


More Than Biology

by DiscontentedWinter



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Abortion, All Human Fic, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Werewolves, Angst, Domestic Violence, Domestic Violence is allowed against omegas, Endgame Sterek, Eventual Happy Ending, M/M, Mpreg, Scott is a Good Friend, Self-Harm, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Suicide Attempt, mentions of mpreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-05
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-21 09:11:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 45,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3686577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is a teenaged, unmated omega whose sixteenth birthday is fast approaching. </p><p>Derek is the beta who loves him, and promises to claim him. </p><p>And then it all goes to hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

 

 

It’s past midnight when Stiles’s bedroom curtains shift open and Derek Hale climbs inside. Stiles, his heart thumping and his stomach knotted up, can’t stop a stupid, tired grin from spreading over his face, even though letting Derek in is his dumbest idea ever. Stiles is a teenaged, unmated omega, and if anyone found out Derek was here it would pretty much ruin his reputation, and his dad’s, for life, but at the moment Stiles doesn’t care.

“Hey,” Derek says quietly, a slight quirk to his lips. It’s about as close to a real smile as Stiles has ever seen from Derek, but that’s just Derek all over. He has this blinding, radiant smile he uses for damn good effect when he wants to get out of a traffic ticket, or doesn’t want servers to spit in his food, but _this_ smile—this slight, shy smile that barely tugs at the corners of his mouth—is the real thing. And it’s all for Stiles.

“Hey.” Stiles stands up from his desk and crosses his bedroom floor. He stands awkwardly in front of Derek for a second, before Derek reaches out and curls his fingers around his wrist, and it’s warm, and comfortable and _right_. Stiles leans into him.

“I saw your light was still on.” Derek rubs a hand up his back, the touch gentle. “Are you doing your homework?”

Stiles glances at his open laptop. “Nah. Just talking to the group.”

“Everyone okay?” Derek asks.

This is what Stiles loves about Derek the most. Not only is he actually supportive of Stiles’s online group, More Than Biology, he actually cares about the other kids Stiles tells him about. Last month, when Stiles was almost panicking because Larissa in Cabo had turned sixteen and dropped off the radar, Derek had been worried too. Then it turned out that Larissa had just lost the notebook she kept her passwords in when she moved into her new place, and she was actually doing okay.

Okay is probably the best any of them can really hope for.

“Yeah,” Stiles says. He gets a weird uneasy itch at the base of his skull when he talks about the group, and a restless energy that builds up and up because it’s got nowhere to go. It’s like he could be shouting this shit from the rooftops, and nobody would even hear him. Like nobody gives a fuck if every year omegas are stripped of more and more rights, just like nobody gives a fuck about how that cheap shirt they bought was made by some five-year-old in a foreign factory, or the worker that put together their newest, shiniest smart phone basically just did an eighteen hour shift for the equivalent of three bucks. Out of sight, out of mind.

Derek shifts his hand up, rubbing his thumb against the top of Stiles’s spine, the skin sliding over the bone. “You sure?”

“Yeah,” Stiles sighs. He sucks in a deep breath and tries to shake off his souring mood. “So, today in school when the other kids were learning chemistry, guess what I did?”

“What?”

Stiles flashes Derek a self-depreciating grin. “I got to learn how to make my own raspberry jam. Can you believe that?”

The school system calls it streaming classes. Stiles calls it bullshit. Why the hell shouldn’t the omega kids be allowed to learn chemistry instead of how to make fucking jam? Why the hell shouldn’t they take driving lessons instead of deportment lessons? What the fuck is deportment anyway? Luckily Stiles already has his license, but who the hell knows how long it’ll be until the government legislates to take it off him? Because omegas don’t need to know chemistry, or how to drive, or history, or how a bill becomes law. Omegas don’t need to know anything except how to be docile and good and obedient.

Stiles is a pretty terrible omega. He’s supposed to be interested in stuff like baking and sewing, and all sorts of nesting behaviour. It turns out he’s more interested in video games, hanging out with his friends, and talking online to other omegas who feel the same way that he does. Stiles knows they’re in the minority—most omegas don’t push back against hundreds of years of tradition—but it’s just such a relief to know he’s not alone. If Stiles is a freak, he’s not the only one.

It’s the reason he started More Than Biology when he was thirteen. It had started as a blog, just a place for Stiles to anonymously vent about the shit that made him angry, but before long it was too big for that. Now, almost three years later, it’s a forum with over twenty thousand members. Most of them are omegas, but a growing number are alphas and betas who are as worried about the increasing curtailing of omega rights as Stiles is.

“How was your jam?” Derek asks, that slight smile playing at the corners of his mouth again.

“Terrible,” Stiles tells him. “Inedible.”

“Good.” Derek leans forward and presses his lips to Stiles’s forehead softly. “ _Good_.”

The tension eases in Stiles at the gentle touch of Derek’s lips. “My dad’s on night shift,” he murmurs softly. “You can stay over if you want.”

“I can’t.” Derek sounds regretful. “You know I can’t.”

Stiles huffs out a breath and steps back from Derek’s embrace. “It’s bullshit!”

He’s angry at the system, not at Derek. The system that says it’d be nobody’s business at all if he let a boy kiss him, or more, if only he’d been born an alpha or a beta. The system that says that because he’s an omega, he can’t possibly make his own decisions, and he’s forever at the mercy of his own biology. Because he’s an omega he’s not allowed out after dark unaccompanied. He’s not allowed to be around alphas or betas without supervision. He’s not allowed to be in a relationship that hasn’t been authorized by the Department of Omega Registration.

Being an omega sucks ass.

The worst thing is, if anyone found out about Derek, it’d be Stiles that somehow got the blame. Even though Derek is older, and a beta. Even though Derek isn’t a useless, dumb, helpless omega, it would be Stiles whose reputation would be ruined. It’d be Stiles who copped all the fallout. No decent alpha or beta would want him after that—something Stiles would totally be okay with, except it’s not that simple. He’d still be mated, because that’s the law. He’d just be mated to whoever the DOR could scrape off the bottom of the barrel. Stiles has heard the horror stories. He’s heard them direct from the omegas on More Than Biology. This one girl in South Carolina got caught out with a boyfriend. When she turned sixteen, the DOR handed her over to some guy four times her age who beat her. Stiles spoke to her online a few times, then didn’t hear from her again. He later found out she’d killed herself. The worst part was that he really didn’t blame her for doing it.

Derek’s gaze is steady. “It’s one more week, Stiles.”

“I know.” Stiles scrubs his knuckles over his buzz cut. One more week until he’s sixteen. They can keep their relationship hidden until then. They have for months. From that first meeting in the stacks in the town library, all the way to now, nobody’s suspected a thing. Stiles hasn’t even told his best friend Scott. “God. I just… it drives me _crazy_ , Der!”

“Me too,” Derek says, his face grave.

Stiles believes him.

God, if anything, the past few months have shown him that Derek is fucking perfect. He likes _Stiles_ : Stiles Stilinksi, the noisy, clumsy, awkward kid who has an opinion on everything and isn’t afraid to share it, not Stiles the little omega. Stiles has always been, and always will be, more than his fucking biology.

It’s kind of a shame that Derek’s awesomeness doesn’t run in his family. Well, maybe it did, but Derek’s only surviving family is Peter Hale. _The_ Peter Hale. The Peter Hale who is a director of the Department of Omega Registration, and pretty much Stiles’s nemesis. Not that he even knows who Stiles is, thank fuck. But still, Stiles feels perfectly justified in hating everything Peter Hale stands for.

Derek doesn’t talk much about his uncle, and Stiles appreciates that. He knows it’s been hard on Derek losing most of his family in a house fire years ago. Then, last year, his sister Laura was killed by some random mugger, and now his uncle Peter is the only family Derek’s got left. So Stiles shuts his mouth about Peter, and so does Derek, and that works just fine, thanks.

“One more week,” Derek repeats, and smiles cautiously.

“You put the papers in?” Stiles’s heart beats a little faster.

Okay, so in a week he’ll be sixteen and he’ll be claimed. That’s the law. When omegas turn sixteen, alphas and betas can make formal bids for them. Which is exactly as backward and medieval as it sounds. Particularly given that Stiles gets no say in it. Neither does his dad, really. Okay, so whoever wants him will have to submit the bid to Sheriff Stilinksi, but unless the Sheriff has a damn good reason to refuse—a better reason than “I don’t want to let my kid get treated like a piece of meat”—then the Department of Omega Registration will intervene and turn Stiles over anyway.

Ever since Stiles turned thirteen and was classified as an Omega, he’s been terrified. Except now he’s not. Derek’s twenty-two, and a beta. He’s old enough to put in a bid for an omega of his own, and Derek’s already promised Stiles he’s going to do that. And Stiles’s dad might not be happy about it, but Stiles knows he won’t have any grounds to refuse. The Hale family is wealthy, and well-regarded. Stiles literally could not do better.

“I put the papers in,” Derek says, his smile growing.

Stiles leaps forward and hugs him tight. “Oh, thank God!”

He’s pretty sure that nobody else is going to put in a bid for him. And, even if they do, Stiles will ask his dad to pick Derek for him. His dad won’t be happy about it—he hates the system as much as Stiles does, and he’ll hate Stiles having anything to do with Peter Hale, even if it’s only by association with Derek—but he’ll agree in the end when Stiles tells him the truth. And the truth is that Stiles is in love.

“One more week,” Derek tells him softly, and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth.

One more week.

When Derek leaves, Stiles feels better than he has all day. He sits back down at his laptop, checks in with a few people, and writes a post about how it’s their allies—the alphas and betas who love them—who will eventually help them force change. Because he believes, more than anything, that love is always stronger than hate.

 

***

 

The sentiment is pretty hard to hold onto in the cold light of day. At least when the cold light of day involves a presentation from the DOR to the omega students of Beacon Hills High. When the announcement goes out over the PA, Stiles huffs to himself as he gathers his books together. Great. Another actual class ruined. Math, this time. He slings his backpack over his shoulder and makes a face at Scott as he and the only other omega in the class, a kid called Jason, head for the gym.

Jason is what everyone would call a good omega. He does all his special homework and takes extra classes on weekends on cooking and housekeeping, and is actually jealous of Stiles for turning sixteen first and getting to be mated. Stiles doesn’t hate him or anything, but he really can’t relate to him. At all.

They walk to the gym together, joining the trickle of other omega kids from different classes. There are fifty-two omega kids at Beacon Hills High. Stiles knows every one of them. He suspects a few of them are members of More Than Biology—he overheard some of them whispering about it once—but he doesn’t know for sure. Anonymity is vital for the group. Stiles would never tell them he was the founder, even if he knew for sure they were in the group. It’s safer for everyone that way. The group isn’t illegal, but then again, neither was staying out at night up until three years ago. The rules can change very quickly.

Stiles takes a seat on the bleachers and prepares to be bored out of his skull by whatever bullshit the DOR is pushing at them now.

Except it’s not just some random in a suit who steps up onto the podium. It’s Peter Hale. He smiles out at his captive audience, looking handsome and charming, with more than a dash of slick politician thrown in.

Stiles sits up straighter.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” he says, in a friendly tone of voice that makes Stiles bristle, but some of the others smile and blush. “For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Peter Hale. I’m a director at the Department of Omega Registration, and I live right here in Beacon Hills.” He winks at the front row. “Go Cyclones!”

Stiles tries very, very hard not to roll his eyes.

“Today I’m here to talk to you about an exciting new direction you’ll all be taking starting tomorrow. If it’s successful, which I think it will be, it’ll be rolled out across the state in time for the next school year.”

Stiles glances at a few of the teachers who are watching. It’s hard to tell, but he thinks some of them are pretty unhappy. Coach Finstock definitely is, but that’s probably only because his gym’s been taken over by Peter Hale.

Peter smiles at the group again. “At the Department, we think it’s high time that schools catered more for the needs of _all_ their students, not just the alphas and betas.”

A girl sitting in front of Stiles nods along obediently.

“So, starting tomorrow, omega students will be streamed into their own classes. These classes are specially designed to teach you the skills you need for your futures, and to help you develop your best qualities. They’ll be focussed on subjects you might have touched on previously, like cooking, and home sciences, and parenting, but there will also be a focus on your wellbeing and health, and on the qualities you need develop in order to become the best omegas you can for your future mates.” Peter’s smile is still perfectly in place. “It’s a very exciting program, and I know you’re all going to love it.”

Stiles schools his features and glances down the end of the bleachers. There’s a kid with glasses handing out a stack of papers.

“Now, you’ll all be anxious to have a look at your new timetables,” Peter says. “I’ll let you have a little read of those and then, if you’ve got any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them.”

Stiles almost wrenches the paper from the kid’s hands when the kid gets close enough. He stares down at it, a sick feeling rising in his stomach.

Every single regular class is missing from his schedule. Stiles blinks, and is horrified when his vision blurs and the words on the page swim. He’s not going to cry. Not in public. Not in front of Peter Hale.

But every class is gone. His new timetable tells him that now all his classes are going to be held in the omega study center, which is apparently the three classrooms closest to the library. And tomorrow morning he’ll learn cooking, sewing, cleaning, and how make his house look good for his mate. Then they have a lunch break, but not at the same time as the rest of the school. After lunch Stiles will learn grooming, and presentation, and something called Traditional Behavioral Studies. Then sex ed, and nap time. Fucking nap time? Nap time until—his breath catches—until a parent or authorized guardian collects him directly from the classroom.

He feels like he’s in kindergarten again. Creepy fucking _Stepford Wives_ kindergarten.  

Stiles hunches over his new timetable and glances around the gym. Most of the other omegas appear curious and not troubled at all. Only one or two seem as anxious as Stiles.

When Peter Hale takes questions, most of them are about where the new classes are exactly, and who the teachers will be, and whether or not they need to bring pajamas for nap time. Nobody asks why they won’t be learning English or Math or Chemistry or History anymore. Nobody asks why they weren’t consulted about this being something they wanted.

Stiles imagines himself a lot braver than he is, standing up and shouting that he’s not a second-class citizen. Shouting that he wants to learn how to be more than someone’s docile mate.

He doesn’t though. He sits quietly and stares at his timetable, and wishes he couldn’t feel Peter Hale’s curious gaze sliding over him.

 

***

 

Stiles doesn’t go to school the next day. He shoves his new timetable at his dad over breakfast.

“Jesus,” John says in an undertone, and proceeds to write him a sick note. “I’m so sorry, kiddo.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Stiles says. And it doesn’t, for him. He’s sixteen in a week. His school days are over as soon as he’s mated anyway, and he knows that. It’s the other kids he worries about. The younger kids.

“In my day, omegas could still go to college,” John says. “And now…”

He lets the thought hang, but gives Stiles an extra long hug before he leaves for work.

Stiles stays in bed the entire day and thinks about taking the rest of the week off, but he doesn’t. He wants to check out the classes for himself, while he’s still got the chance. That way he’ll at least have some idea about them when it comes to discussing them on More Than Biology. There’s already been a lot of panicked chat about whether the classes will become introduced everywhere after the Beacon Hills trial.

“Dude!” Scott exclaims when Stiles arrives at school the following morning. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah,” Stiles lies.

Scott claps him on the back. “I took notes for you yesterday, but I kind of didn’t understand some of the Chemistry ones, so they might be wrong.”

“I don’t take Chemistry anymore,” Stiles says with a bitter smile.

Scott frowns. “What?”

“I only take omega classes now.” Stiles hates the hitch in his voice.

“Dude.” Scott’s face falls. “Will I see you at lunch?”

“We don’t have lunch with the regular students,” Stiles says.

He leaves Scott standing there, mouth open.

The omega classes are exactly what he thought they’d be, but worse. It turns out that Traditional Behavioral Studies is code for ‘this is how you present yourself, ass-up, for when your mate breeds you.’ Maybe there’s more to it than that. It’s kind of hard for Stiles to pay attention over the roar of the blood in his skull and the sound of some of the younger kids crying in humiliation. Even Jason, the good omega, looks quietly shell-shocked after being instructed on exactly how far to keep his knees apart.

It doesn’t help that Peter Hale pops in to oversee the class, smiling his charming smile as he watches the kids shiver in embarrassment.

“Stilinksi, isn’t it?” he asks, bending down close to Stiles.

Stiles might be wearing his jeans and his hoodie, but he’s never felt more exposed. “Yes, Alpha Hale.”

“The Sheriff’s son,” Peter says, his smile tightening. “I think you know my nephew. Derek.”

Stiles almost breaks position.

Peter doesn’t wait for an answer, only moves on to the next kid.

Stiles never thought he’d actually be counting down the days to his sixteenth birthday, but he is. Desperately. If this is what school is now, he’ll be glad to see the back of it. He wants to be with Derek, with someone who’ll let him be himself, and not expect _this_.

As the days pass, Stiles gets more and more impatient, while his dad gets more and more worried. Stiles knows that his dad is anxious about his future. He has every right to be.

The night before his birthday, his dad comes up into his room.

“Stiles?” His face is drawn, like he hasn’t been sleeping well.

“Dad,” he says. “It’ll be okay. I _promise_.”

His dad hugs him. “It should be me promising you, son.”

Stiles smiles into his dad’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay.”

He thinks of Derek, and wishes he was here.

 

***

 

The morning of Stiles’s sixteenth birthday dawns bright and clear. Stiles checks his phone. For the first time in years he hasn’t got an excited message from Scott. Instead, he’s got: _Let me know as soon as you find out, bro._

For the first time in years, his dad hasn’t made him pancakes for his birthday breakfast. When Stiles gets to the kitchen his dad is sitting at the table, a letter in his shaking hands. “You got a bid,” he says, his voice wooden.

Stiles bites his lip to stop himself from grinning as he catches a glimpse of the envelope it came out of. Bids are ridiculously steeped in pomp. The envelope has an ornate scrolling letter on the broken seal on the back: _H_.

His dad follows his gaze. “Hale.”

A smile spreads across his face. “Really?”

His dad looks pale. “Stiles…”

“No,” Stiles laughs, almost dizzy with relief. “No, Dad, it’s okay. I _know_ Derek, and he’s a good guy, and we planned this, and—”

“Stiles!”

The distress in his dad’s voice stops him cold, and Stiles really sees his dad’s face for the first time. Really sees the devastation carving out a hollow mask of his features.

Stiles feels his blood run cold. “Wh-what?”

“It’s not from Derek Hale.” His dad’s voice breaks. “It’s from Peter. It’s from Peter Hale.” 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

_No._

Stiles can’t hear anything over the buzzing in his skull. His dad is holding him by the shoulders, saying something. Stiles stares at the shapes his dad’s mouth makes, but he can’t hear the words.

Because no.

The bid has to be from Derek. Derek said he’d put the papers in. Derek _promised_. A tiny voice in the back of Stiles’s mind tells him that this is all a mistake. His dad read the letter wrong, or the DOR processed the bid wrong, or something. Because this cannot be happening. Not to him.

He swallows, and tries to keep himself from sliding into a total panic attack. He stares at the clock on the kitchen wall. It’s just past seven.

At nine he has to present himself to the DOR office in town.

That’s how it works.

And there, someone will check his paperwork and sign him over to his new mate.

That’s how it works.

Except it’s supposed to be Derek waiting there to collect him, hiding his happiness under a serious frown, not—

Not _Peter_.

He cant—

He can’t—

He can’t _breathe_. He’s standing in the middle of the kitchen, choking on his own panic, sobs wrenching out of him, and he can’t even breathe. He can’t—

“Stiles!” His dad grips him by the shoulders. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, kid.”

For two more hours he has. That’s all. And then—

Stiles pulls out of his dad’s grasp, and makes a dive for the sink. His empty stomach churns and his throat burns as he vomits. Nothing but saliva and stinging bile comes up. Stiles holds onto the edge of the sink, heaving, before he slides down onto the kitchen floor and buries his face in his hands.

His dad crouches over him, bundling his shaking limbs into a hug. “It’s gonna be okay, son. It’s gonna be okay.”

Except, Stiles knows, it really isn’t.

 

***

 

At eight, Stiles sits on his bed, his small bag of allowable items clutched in his hand. Toiletries and medication to see him through the next few days. That’s it. He’s not allowed to take anything else with him. It’s the duty of his mate to provide everything else he might need.

Beside him, his phone buzzes with another text from Scott: _Bro? Are you ok?_

Stiles picks up his phone in his shaking hands and sends back: _Peter Hale_.

Then he drops his phone back onto the bed and stands up. He crosses the floor and sits at his desk. Opens his laptop. He blinks at the screen while he waits for it to power up. Then he goes straight to More Than Biology. He has a bunch of messages waiting for him. He’s written a few posts in the last few weeks talking about his upcoming sixteenth birthday. He didn’t mention the exact date, because he was too afraid it would identify him, but people are curious. Has it happened yet? Did he turn sixteen and get a bid? Alpha or beta? Is he okay?

Stiles can’t bring himself to reply to anyone.

He just clicks over to the message boards and stares at the list of topics numbly. The top one catches his eye: _Happy birthday MTB_.

MTB is his username. He clicks on the link, but the message is blank apart from the title. The poster is an anonymous guest user. Apart from Derek and Scott and his dad, nobody knows he runs the site. He doesn’t think any of them would post it. Stiles wonders if one of the kids from school put two and two together. Not that it matters, anyway.

The post already has a glut of comments, most of them asking if it’s really MTB’s birthday. A few of them are accusing the poster of trolling just to stir up speculation. Stiles uses his admin privileges to delete the entire post.

He’s one of a dozen admins on the site. It grew so quickly that there was no way he could do it on his own. Even Stiles doesn’t know the details of the other admins, except for their user names and their locations. They’ve all been with him since the start though. They’re the ones who made contact and shared their own stories, back when More Than Biology was just a blog.

Stiles opens a message window and sends the admins a private message: _16 today. Don’t know when I can post again._

It’s not long before he gets replies.

From JGrrF: _Are u ok, MTB?_

From HinDC: _sucks, dude_

From Lina79: _Stay strong, baby._

Stiles doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know how. He closes his eyes. For the first time in a long time he misses Sprout. He still remembers the first email she sent him. It started with: _I’m an alpha, and I’m sorry. I want to make it better for you. For all of us._ It had taken Stiles a long time to trust he wasn’t being trolled. It had taken even longer for him to convince her to post on More Than Biology. She was the first alpha who didn’t slam them with abuse. The first, but then others had come. Sprout’s posts had been like a tipping point for the site. Then she’d gone to law school. And then she’d stopped posting.

Stiles had emailed a few times but she hadn’t responded.

She’d been the first alpha he’d actually responded to the way everyone always promised would happen. Maybe it was just because he’d been an omega kid going through his first horrible heats, responding, even online, to an alpha’s presence, but Stiles had thought it was more than that. She could calm him and comfort him with just a few typed words. She’d cared, and it hadn’t made Stiles feel weak and needy at all. It had made him feel like he could take on the world.

He could use that, right about now.

He’s so fucking scared.

Stiles opens his eyes as he hears the familiar roar of a dirt bike in the street. _Scott._ God. He can’t talk to Scott right now, except he can’t not talk to him either. This might be his last chance, and they’ve been best friends ever since the day some little asshole knocked Stiles over at kindergarten, and Scott helped him up and then shared his lunch with him. Stiles had thought Scott would ditch him when they turned thirteen and Scott presented as an alpha—much to everyone’s surprise—and Stiles as an omega, also much to everyone’s surprise. Because Scott wasn’t aggressive enough to be an alpha, and Stiles wasn’t obedient enough to be an omega.

“But you know, bro,” Scott had said, a frown creasing his forehead, “that’s just… that’s just _biology_. That’s not all of who we are.”

Stiles had written his first blog post that night.

The engine of the dirt bike chokes to a stop. Moments later, footsteps are pounding up the stairs, and Stiles’s door is shoved open.

“Stiles!” Scott’s a mess. He’s still wearing his pajama pants under his hoodie, and his hair is standing up all over the place. “Peter Hale, seriously?”

Stiles tries to say something, but all of a sudden he’s crying, and he hasn’t cried in front of Scott since his mom died, and this feels _worse_ somehow, and he hates himself because how selfish is that? But he’s terrified, and the clock’s ticking down, and in less than an hour he won’t have _anyone_. He won’t have anyone or anything that Peter Hale doesn’t want him to have.

He cries wet, wrenching sobs into Scott’s shoulder, and Scott squeezes him tight. After a few minutes, when Stiles thinks he’s probably cried himself out for the moment at least, Scott draws a deep, shuddering breath.

“Bro,” he says, his voice serious. “Let’s go.”

“What?” Stiles draws back and blinks at him.

“Let’s go. Let’s just fucking _go_!”

“Go where?”

Scott’s eyes are huge. “Anywhere!”

“We can’t just…we can’t…”

“Stiles,” Scott says. “What have we got to lose?”

 

***

 

Stiles knows his dad hears them as they climb out the window. And he knows this is a really dumb idea, because he knows exactly how it’s going to end. He’s read this same story a thousand times on More Than Biology. But a part of him wants to believe that it’ll be different for him. That he and Scott aren’t just two kids with a single dirt bike, no money, no plan, and no fucking clue. A part of him thinks that fuck it, someone has to make it, right?

They make it to the end of the street before a police car pulls out of the intersection in front of them and Scott has to hit the brakes so fast it’s a miracle they don’t end up in a slide. Stiles holds on tight as they take a detour, fishtailing across Mrs. Gunderson’s front lawn and heading back the way they came. A second police car is waiting for them.

Scott pulls the bike up, narrowing his eyes. There’s a tight gap between the fence at number 47 and number 49, and Stiles can almost see Scott’s brain ticking over.

“Don’t,” he says into Scott’s ear as the police cars move in closer. He looks over to his own house, to where his dad’s standing on the front lawn, shoulders slumped, agony written all over his face. “We won’t make it.”

“Dude, we _have_ to.”

Stiles wants to cry again because Scott’s totally going to crash his bike and kill them both in the attempt, and it’s the dumbest, stupidest, most noble idea in the history of the universe. There’s probably nothing Stiles can say to stop him, so he unwraps his arms from around Scott’s waist and steps off the back of the bike instead.

“Stiles?”

Stiles shakes his head.

“Bro, come on! I’ve _got_ this!”

“That’s the same thing you said when we were eight and playing Mario Karts, right before you drove off the edge of Yoshi Valley.” Stiles hugs his chest to try and relieve the ache building there.

Scott cuts the ignition.

Stiles looks up as the deputies approach. He knows these guys. They work for his dad. They’re supposed to be good guys.

“Yeah,” one of them says into his radio to dispatch. “He tried to do a runner, but we’ve got him.”

Stiles starts to shake when the deputy unhooks the cuffs from his belt.

“Are you kidding?” Scott exclaims. “He didn’t run! I was the one driving, and it’s not even time for him to be signed over yet!”

 _Signed over,_ Stiles thinks wildly as the deputy cuffs him. _Like a package._

The deputy looks almost sorry for a second, then motions to Scott. “Get off the bike, McCall. You’re under arrest too.”

 

***

 

The station is quieter than Stiles has ever thought possible. Nobody says anything to him when the deputies take him in. The few people that look at him have small, pitying smiles, and Stiles can’t tell if it’s for him, or for the embarrassment he’s caused his dad, or if they’re thinking of their own kids and picturing them in Stiles’s place.

“Worst idea ever, bro,” Scott says in a small voice as they sit together on a bench in a cell.

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees. “Thanks, though.” He curls his fingers through Scott’s and holds his hand until a deputy comes to tell them that Scott’s being let out.

“I’ll come and see you,” Scott promises. “I will!”

“Okay,” Stiles whispers, even though they know the promise is meaningless.

Peter Hale is a traditionalist. Everyone knows it. He won’t let Stiles hang around with another alpha, even if that other alpha is a sixteen-year-old kid and about as threatening as a labradoodle puppy.

Stiles sits in the cell and waits.

He hears raised voices at one point. His dad, and Deputy Parrish. His dad’s doing all the yelling, and Parrish is saying something in a calm, gentle tone that’s too low for Stiles to hear. Stiles draws his legs up and presses his face into his knees, because his dad’s yelling that this is bullshit, that he’s in charge here, and no son of his should be sitting in a cell. Parrish is obviously trying to talk him down.

Some time later the door opens, and his dad is framed in the doorway.

“Stiles,” he says. There’s no fight in him anymore.

“I’m sorry,” Stiles whispers. “I’m sorry.” He’s sorry he’s not a good omega. He’s sorry he’s made his dad look bad. He’s sorry the whole town will know he tried to run. “Dad, I’m so scared!”

His dad steps into the cell and crouches down on the floor in front of him. He puts his hands on either side of Stiles on the bench, bracketing him. “Look at me, kiddo.”

Stiles scrubs his face with his hands, and blinks down at him.

“I know you’re scared,” his dad says. “I wish to hell I could tell you there’s no reason to be, but you know I can’t do that. I just spent ten minutes on the phone to a lawyer, who tells me there’s nothing I can do. Well, I can keep trying until I can find one who might listen, because, kiddo? You’re right. You and all those people on your site. You’re _right_. You’ve always been right. Now you have to be strong, okay? You hear me? You have to be strong, and you have to stay strong until I can figure out some way to get you out of this.”

“There is no way,” Stiles whispers, his voice hoarse from all the tears he’s shed this morning. “It’s the law.”

“You let me worry about that.” His dad squeezes his knee. “I need you to stay strong. Can you do that?”

Stiles nods, even though strong is the last thing he feels right now.

“Take your suppressants,” his dad tells him. “Take your Adderall. And remember what you are, okay, son?”

Stiles swallows. “More than my biology.”

His dad shows him a wavering smile. “Much, _much_ more.”

 

***

 

Hours later, the cell door swings open and Stiles’s head snaps up.

Peter Hale.

He’s dressed casually, in jeans and a v-neck, but he still manages to exude an air of effortless authority the way the most powerful alphas can. He’s a handsome guy. If Stiles didn’t know anything about him, that might have been his first impression. He’s in his late thirties, maybe, and he’s in good shape. He has sharp, clever features and intense blue eyes. His gaze falls on Stiles, and he looks him up and down. His mouth curls into a slight smile that’s almost a smirk, and Stiles’s stomach twists.

“Hello, omega.”

“Alpha Hale,” Stiles whispers, and wonders where Derek is, and what went wrong.

“I’ve had the most tiresome morning,” Peter says. “Imagine my surprise when I went to collect my new mate from the DOR office, only to be told that he was here instead.” His tone is light, but Stiles can’t help flinching back a little. “Your childish behavior reflects badly upon both of us.”

Stiles doesn’t know what response the alpha wants. He drops his gaze instead.

Peter sighs loudly. “Come on then. Get up!”

Stiles clambers to his feet. His stomach churns, and he wants to be sick again.

Peter folds his arms across his chest. “Here. Now. I won’t tell you again.”

Stiles stumbles toward him, his breath hitching. Hot tears slide down his cheeks, and he scrubs his face with his palms.

“Hands at your sides,” Peter says mildly. “Did you learn nothing in your class yesterday? In one ear and out the other, I suppose.”

Stiles’s face burns. All he can remember is being on the floor, his weight held up on his knees and elbows, feeling the stretch of his jeans across his ass as the teacher nudged his legs further apart. He drops his hands to his sides and fixes his gaze to the floor.

“There now,” Peter says. “That wasn’t so hard, was it, omega?”

“No, Alpha,” Stiles croaks.

He tries not to fidget as Peter moves around behind him. His skin crawls. He’s sure he can feel the intensity of the man’s stare. When Peter puts a hand on his shoulder, he flinches and starts to tremble.

“Shh.” Peter’s breath is warm on the nape of his neck. “Settle down. You’re a twitchy little one, aren’t you?”

Stiles swallows as Peter rubs his thumb up the side of his neck. The gesture is oddly soothing, and Stiles hates it. He tenses again under Peter’s touch.

Peter laughs quietly. “Come on then, omega, let’s get you home.”

With his hand still on Stiles’s shoulder, he steers him out of the cell.

Deputy Parrish meets them outside. “Alpha Hale,” he says, and holds out a small plastic bag. Stiles’s toothbrush and meds.

Peter squeezes Stiles’s shoulder gently, before nodding at him. “Go on. Take them and thank the deputy.”

Last week Stiles played football with Parrish at Deputy Hanson’s backyard barbeque, and chugged a whole jug of orange Kool-Aid because Parrish dared him ten bucks he couldn’t, and now he has to wait for his alpha’s permission to even talk to the man.

He takes the bag from Parrish. “Where’s my dad?”

Parrish’s gaze shifts from Peter and then back to Stiles. “It was decided you’d make the transition more comfortably if your father wasn’t here.”

Stiles doesn’t bother ask who decided that. Of course it was Peter. He draws a shuddering breath. “Will you look after him? Make sure he eats right?”

Parrish nods.

“Let’s go, omega,” Peter says. “I’ve already wasted enough of my morning.”

 

***

 

The old Hale house that burned down with most of Derek’s family inside was built in the Preserve at the edge of town. Stiles remembers exploring the charred ruins with Scott when they were younger. The house has been rebuilt since, on the same land. It doesn’t look anything like the old one. Stiles supposes that was by choice. The new house is sleek and modern, made of steel and chrome and glass.

Strange. When Stiles imagined coming here to live with Derek, he’d thought of it as airy and bright and clean. Now, following Peter inside, it seems cold and unwelcoming.

Peter gives him a tour of the house, making sure to point out the kitchen, the bathroom, and the closet where the cleaning supplies are kept. The house is to be kept spotless, of course. They did have a woman come in once every few days, but it will be Stiles’s privilege to keep the place clean now. Not his job, his _privilege_. Stiles can’t help but think of Jason from school, and how happy all of this would make him.

“Yes, Alpha,” he says when Peter asks him if he’s clear about his duties, but his voice hitches with tears.

Peter’s brow furrows. “Stop crying, for heaven’s sake. You’re not a child anymore.”

Stiles nods, and tries to will his tears away.            

Peter leads him into the kitchen again. “Give me your bag.”

Stiles holds out the little plastic bag.

Peter opens it, and hands him back his toothbrush. Then he takes out the packs of pills. “What are these?”

“Adderall, Alpha,” Stiles says. “I have ADHD. I need them for—”

“Fine.” Peter hands the Adderall over. “It’s your responsibility to tell me when you need the prescription refilled.”

“Yes, Alpha.” Stiles clutches the blister packs tightly.

Peter takes out the bottle next, and checks the label. “Ah.”

“My suppressants,” Stiles says.

Peter smiles and turns the bottle over in his palm, the pills inside rattling. “I know what they are, omega. They’re to stop your heat. They’re also a contraceptive.”

Stiles nods.

Peter unscrews the lid and holds the bottle over the sink. The pills rain down.

“No!” Stiles steps forward.

Peter narrows his eyes. “Stop right there.”

Stiles watches the pills rattle down the drain. “No, I need those!”

He hasn’t suffered through a heat in years. Not since his first few, when it took a while to sort out the dosage he needed from his suppressants.

“Heat is natural,” Peter tells him. “It’s an alpha’s responsibility to see his omega through it, not to rely on pharmaceuticals. You won’t be taking these under my roof. And while some people will tell you it’s rather gauche to breed a teenager, I’m a traditionalist. Omegas are breeders. It’s what you were born to do, and the sooner you start, the better.”

Stiles’s heart pounds loudly in his chest. “But I don’t want to.”

Peter raises his eyebrows. “What you _want_ , omega, is entirely irrelevant.”  

Stiles clamps his mouth shut.

Of course it’s irrelevant. He’s been hearing that since he presented as an omega. He doesn’t get a say in anything, from how the world is run all the way down to what he’s allowed to do with his body. There is nothing in his life that Stiles has any control over, not anymore.

Nothing.

He flinches as Peter turns on the tap and sends the last of the pills down the drain. The blast of the water in the sink is loud, loud enough to cover the sound of the car pulling up, of familiar footsteps, of a key in the door. Peter turns the tap off just as the front door of the house slams shut.

“Peter? What the hell is going on? First you send me out of town for your some urgent paperwork that your office knows nothing about, and you _knew_ today was important, and then by the time I get back—”

Stiles turns.

Derek is standing in the kitchen doorway, a frown on his face.

“Stiles!” The frown vanishes, and relief washes over Derek’s features. He smiles broadly. “You’re here!”

 _I’m here_.

“I went to the DOR office and they said there was a mistake, but you’re here!”

Peter curls his fingers around the back of Stiles’s neck. “There was no mistake, Derek, except perhaps for the one you’re making now. Your bid was never accepted by the DOR, and never passed on to Sheriff Stilinski. This omega is mine.”

Derek pales. “What?”

“This omega is mine,” Peter repeats. He increases the pressure on Stiles’s neck. “On you knees, omega. Show my nephew what a good little boy you are.”

Stiles lets Peter push him to his knees. He stares up at Derek through tear-filled eyes.

“Stiles?” Derek asks, his voice straining. “Peter, what…? Why would you do this? Oh, Jesus, _Stiles_.”

Stiles closes his eyes so he doesn't have to see his own horror reflected in Derek's face. 


	3. Chapter 3

When Peter leaves him—Derek following, questioning, looking quietly devastated as he tears his gaze from Stiles—Stiles gets up off the kitchen floor and retreats to the large closet in the hallway where the cleaning products are kept. He sits down between a mop bucket and a vacuum cleaner and cries. Apparently this is his life now. He’s pretty sure this is the only place in the house where Peter won’t care if he hides. He hasn’t even got a room of his own. He hasn’t even got a bed of his own. He’s got a mattress on the floor beside Peter’s bed.

Fucking alpha traditionalist. Stiles is half-surprised he’s not already chained up somewhere.

Stiles knocks his head against his knees, and remembers what some kid posted once in one of the chats on the forum:

_Alphas are assholes._

_Betas are bastards._

_And omegas are on our own._

Sometime during the afternoon Peter and Derek have a shouting match. Well, Derek does most of the shouting. The sound is pretty distorted, so Stiles cracks the closet door open to listen. It’s mostly the f-bomb, which Peter more than deserves, but probably doesn’t even care about. If he knew Derek had put in a bid for Stiles, and he must have known if he had the DOR pull it and replace it with a bid of his own, then he’s not the sort of guy who’s going to go to pieces just because Derek’s saying some bad words.

Derek stomps back down the stairs, Peter’s voice floating after him. “I don’t know why you’re so angry, Derek! You were right! It was high time we had an omega in the family!”

Stiles inches the closet door closed again, wincing when it clatters slightly. He stares at the crack of light coming in under the door, holding his breath when a dark shape blocks out the light.

_Derek._

He hears Derek sigh as he sits down on the floor outside. “Stiles? I’m so fucking sorry, Stiles. I don’t know why he did this. I don’t _know_.”

Stiles bites his lower lip. Is Derek _crying_? It sounds like Derek’s crying.

A moment later Derek curls his hand under the closet door. “I’m so sorry.”

Stiles brushes his shaking fingers against Derek’s, then jerks back and chokes down a sob. He’s Peter’s omega, not Derek’s. He’s not supposed to touch.

“I’m sorry,” Derek says again. His fingers disappear.

Stiles doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say.

 

***

 

“I’m not a monster,” Peter announces over dinner.

Stiles has made macaroni and cheese. It’s pretty much the only thing he knows how to cook without a recipe. He stands in the corner of the dining room and watches as Peter and Derek eat. His stomach growls, and he’s light-headed. The cheese he shoveled down when he cooked has hardly made a dent in his hunger.

“You only bid on him because I did!” Derek growls.

Peter smiles. “Well, that’s how bidding works, Derek. It’s a competition. A friendly competition.”

“And how is it fair if you made sure the sheriff never saw my bid?”

Peter considers that for a moment. “I said it was friendly. I never said it was fair.” He digs his fork into his mac and cheese. “I liked the look of the boy. I think, with the proper guidance, he’ll make a fine omega. I also think you wouldn’t have shown him the proper guidance.”

Derek glances quickly at Stiles, and then away again.

No. If Stiles had been Derek’s omega he would have been sitting at the table with him, on his lap, probably, while they giggled their way through their first meal together as mates. Then Stiles would have demanded they watch a movie, and picked The Avengers _again_ , because that was their movie, ever since Stiles had lugged his laptop to the library and they’d hidden in the Rare Books room and watched it together. And Derek would have rolled his eyes and complained that he didn’t even like it, but they would have watched it anyway.

“I’m not going to hurt him, Derek,” Peter says. “I’m going to wait until he’s ready before I even lay a finger on him as a mate. I want him to be happy here with us.”

Stiles’s stomach growls again.

“Are you hungry, omega?” Peter asks in a soft voice.

Derek’s cutlery clatters to the table. “He has a name!”

“I’m well aware of that, Derek.” Peter raises his eyebrows. “But, as you’d know if you’d actually been serious about taking on an omega, in the first few weeks it’s vital to establish the household hierarchy. The omega needs to understand his place, and addressing him by his rank reinforces that to him in the most painless way possible.”

 _Painless_. Stiles’s brain seizes on that word, and he suddenly has no doubt that Peter is fully acquainted with all the other ways to train an omega. He’s a traditionalist, after all. Jesus. He’s probably even got a breeding bench somewhere in the house.

“He’s a human being,” Derek says flatly.

“Yes, but he has special needs. Omegas can’t be trusted to control their own lives,” Peter says. “They’re unstable, without guidance. Do you know what the rates of suicide and self-harm are in the omega population?”

Stiles knows. More than three times the rate for alphas or betas. But it’s not because omegas are inherently unstable. It’s because they’re treated like slaves, like breeders, like animals, like dumb children. It’s because they have no power, no agency, and no fucking hope.

“Omegas need stability. They need _boundaries_.” Peter smiles at Stiles. “Now, I asked you a question. Are you hungry, omega?”

Stiles wants to lie, but he _is_ hungry. Food seems more important right now than pride, even if he’s only got a pinch of that left. “Yes, Alpha Hale.”

Peter clicks his fingers and points to the floor beside his chair.

Stiles’s face burns, but he obeys. He’s _hungry_ , okay? He moves toward Peter and kneels on the floor. He can’t bring himself to look at Derek.

Peter takes something out of his pocket. A small brown bottle. He twists the cap off, and tips a pill into his palm. He holds it out for Stiles.

“Wh-what is it, Alpha?”

“It’s a herbal supplement,” Peter says. “It will induce your natural cycle now you’re off those terrible suppressants.”

Heat pills. No. No fucking way. Bad enough that his heat will come along sooner or later now he can’t take suppressants, but Stiles doesn’t want anything to do with pills that will hurry it along. “No! I don’t want to take them! You don’t have any right to—”

Peter moves quickly. Before Stiles even knows what’s happening he feels the crack of Peter’s palm against his cheek, and his head snaps back. For a second he just sways on his knees, his face stinging, and he has no fucking idea what just happened. Nobody has ever slapped him in the face before.

“Peter!” Derek’s chair scrapes back. “What the hell are you doing?”

Stiles lifts a hand to his throbbing cheek, and blinks away shocked tears. He’s shaking. “Der?”

“I believe my omega just tried to school me about my rights,” Peter says. His voice is low and amused. “And I believe I just demonstrated that I know exactly what my rights are. And if my omega thinks that was harsh, he should read up on the law and find out just how far I can punish him if I am displeased with his behavior.”

“Peter, he’s a kid!”

“He’s an omega! Sometimes I think you’re as bad as Laura was with all this nonsense about omega rights.” Peter reaches out and cups his hand over Stiles’s burning cheek. He smiles down at him gently. “You’re not doing the omega any favors by putting silly ideas in his head. Because it won’t be you who faces the consequences, will it, Derek? It’ll be this little thing here.”

Stiles wants to get angry. He wants to spit in Peter’s face and then laugh and tell him that it’s not Derek who put these ideas in Stiles’s head, that it was the other way around. Because—surprise!—omegas are more than capable of coming up with their own ideas, and more than capable of sharing them.

Peter rubs his thumb against Stiles’s cheekbone. “He’s an omega. I grant you that at the moment he can almost pass as a beta, but you’ve never seen an omega in heat, have you?”

“It’s not his fault he goes into heat.”

“I didn’t say it was his fault. It’s perfectly natural.” Peter takes the pill in his other hand and brings his fingers to Stiles’s mouth. Stiles closes his eyes as he pushes the pill between his lips. Peter holds his mouth closed until he swallows. “But, once you see it, you’ll see exactly why omegas aren’t capable of making rational decisions. You’ll see why they need to be protected from themselves.”

Stiles flinches as Derek’s footsteps stomp out of the dining room.

Peter digs his fingers into Stiles’s jaw. “You’ll be a wet little slut for your alpha soon enough, won’t you, omega? Won’t you?”

“Yes, Alpha,” Stiles manages, tears sliding down his face.

“Good omega,” Peter says, and rewards him with a forkful of mac and cheese.

 

***

 

Stiles is in bed by ten, lying on the mattress beside Peter’s bed, wearing a pair of sleep pants that are new and itchy. He tries not to think about home, and about how he’d still be up for hours yet if he was there, chatting on More Than Biology, or maybe putting up a new post.

The worst thing is, he knows that Peter hasn’t actually been terrible to him. He’s heard stories of kids who were bent over and fucked before they even left the DOR offices with their new mates. And he knows that Peter has the right to discipline him and, in the grand scheme of things, that a slap in the face is no big deal. He just hadn’t expected it to shock him to the core like it did. It was only a slap.

And he knows that Peter has the right to refuse to give him his suppressants, just like he’s got the right to give him heat pills if he wants. He’s known the rules since he was thirteen, and made his first visit to the DOR office in town, clutching his dad’s hand tightly as he was given his paperwork. He’s had three years to come to terms with everything that might happen to him, except then Derek Hale came along and gave him something that, right now, seems the cruelest thing of all: hope.

He closes his eyes as the bedroom door opens and Peter enters. He listens to him moving around the room. He hears the comforter and sheets rustle, and the sound of Peter climbing into bed. Then the pages of a book turning.

“I know you’re not asleep, omega.”

Stiles keeps his eyes closed anyway.

“Do you want to get into bed with me?”

“No, Alpha, please.”

“Hmm. You might find it gets a little cold down there on the floor. If you change your mind, you know where I am.”

Stiles doesn’t answer.

It’s the middle of the night when he wakes shivering. Peter’s got the air-conditioning set so low that it’s ridiculous. Stiles curls up, hugging himself for warmth, but it just seems to get worse. The cold builds and builds, and Stiles can’t sleep. He tries to last it out but in the end, hating himself, he climbs to his feet and slides into bed beside Peter.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” Peter murmurs, slinging an arm over Stiles and pulling him closer. “Don’t tense up. I promised I wouldn’t breed you until you were ready, remember?”

“Yes, Alpha,” Stiles whispers.

Peter slots their bodies together so that he’s spooning Stiles. “You’re freezing, omega.”

Stiles tries not to flinch away and Peter splays his hand over his stomach and rubs him gently.

“In a few weeks, this will all be behind you. You’ll be settled. Happy.” Peter’s fingers dip under the elastic waistband of his sleep pants and slide across his abdomen. “You won’t even know yourself.”

That’s exactly what Stiles is afraid of. He squirms as Peter’s touch slips lower, and Peter laughs gently in his ear, his hot breath tickling.

“Just getting you used to being touched. Getting you ready for your heat. When it comes, you’ll beg me, you know. You won’t be able to help yourself.”

Stiles knows. It makes him want to be sick, but he knows.

“Happy birthday, omega,” Peter whispers, and presses his mouth against the back of Stiles’s neck.

Stiles’s skin crawls.

 

 

***

 

In the morning, Stiles fixes breakfast for Peter and Derek. He makes French toast. God, what kind of useless omega is he that he needs to consult a recipe book to make French toast? The sort of useless omega who can totally kick ass when it comes to Call of Duty, and every exam ever, and made the track team every year since he first tried out, actually. And exactly none of that stuff will ever count for anything ever again. Only stuff like _this_ will. Making meals, and cleaning, and kneeling beside his alpha’s chair to wait to be fed like a fucking dog.

Peter leaves for work first, tilting Stiles’s chin up before he goes and pressing a chaste kiss against his firmly-closed mouth.

“Stiles,” Derek says the second the door closes.

“I don’t think you should talk to me, Der,” Stiles says, drawing a deep breath. He’s told himself that he’s done with crying. He promised his dad he’d be strong, and that starts now.

Derek looks at his watch, and Stiles figures he’s running late for work.

Derek’s in his last year in college. He’s going to be a teacher. At the moment he’s on prac at the elementary school. Stiles knows this, because the first time he saw Derek crack an actual smile it was when he was talking about the funny stuff the kids in his class get up to.

“I just…” Derek shakes his head. “I just wanted to tell you that, when you clean the house, Laura’s room was the last one at the end of the hall. Peter never goes in there, but he’ll still want you to clean it.”

Stiles’s mind goes blank for a second, then a wild, bitter laugh escapes him. “Oh, okay. After everything that’s happened, _this_ is what you wanted to tell me? To remember to clean your dead sister’s room?”

Derek looks stricken. “Stiles, I—”

“Just go away,” Stiles tells him, anger burning in the pit of his stomach. “Go!”

Derek steps closer to him. “Stiles—”

“Just fuck off!” Stiles swings a fist before he even realizes, and it connects with Derek’s jaw. Stiles isn’t sure what hurts the most, the pain in his hand, or the look on Derek’s face as he reels back in shock. “Just go away! You can’t help me, so just go away!”

Derek retreats from the kitchen. Moments later the front door slams shut.

“Great,” Stiles mutters, going to the freezer and pulling out a bag of frozen peas to wrap around his hand. “And now you just punched a beta.”

He knows Derek won’t tell, though. Somehow that makes him feel even worse.

 

***

 

It’s mid-afternoon by the time Stiles makes it as far as Laura’s room. He hates cleaning. Whatever everyone says, not all omegas feel warm and happy and house-proud as they push a vacuum cleaner around. Stiles did most of the housework for his dad, but that was only because it made sense because of his dad’s shift work. And sure, okay, he felt good when his dad thanked him for it, but that’s because his dad is his dad, not because Stiles is an omega.

Laura’s room is light and airy. He figures it’s exactly how she left it. There are picture frames on the desk, and a shelf cluttered with mementos and kitschy little souvenirs. There’s a sweater thrown over the end of the bed. Laura’s been dead for over a year now, but it feels like she’s only left the room for a few minutes.

Stiles never met her, but Derek talked about her sometimes. After losing everyone in the fire, and then losing Laura… Stiles isn’t sure he could have come back from a tragedy like that. He thinks that a part of Derek hasn’t, not really, just like a part of Stiles has never recovered from losing his mom, but he and Derek were supposed to make it a little bit better for each other. They were supposed to figure it out together.

There’s a folded piece of paper on Laura’s desk. Stiles picks it up idly, and opens it.

His breath catches.

 _Stiles. Peter doesn’t come in here. I can’t talk to you outside, because I don’t want to make things worse for you. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how this happened. I don’t know what to do. I love you_.

Stiles tears the note up into tiny pieces and feeds it into the vacuum cleaner. Then he opens Laura’s desk drawer and finds a notebook. He tears a page out and reaches for a pen in the cup on her desk. The one he chooses has a green-haired troll doll on the end. Stiles rubs the pen between his palms to make the troll’s hair puff out. It takes him a while to figure out what to write.

_I’m sorry I punched you. I love you too. I know you can’t help me, but please don’t ever hate me. I’m scared I won’t be me soon._

He leaves the note folded on Laura’s desk.

 

***

 

That night Peter is talkative over dinner. The omega classes at the high school are going well, and the Department of Education is watching the results of the trial closely. By next year Peter expects all school districts in California will have adopted the program, and then it’s only a matter of time before the other states follow. Within ten years, Peter expects the omegas will be entirely separated in their own schools.

“Separated or segregated?” Derek asks sourly.

Peter runs his hand over Stiles’s head. “Semantics, Derek. Omegas have different needs, and those needs should be catered to in a comfortable environment. If that means removing omegas from regular schools, where they’re often subjected to bullying by the other students, I think that’s in their best interests, don’t you?”

“What if they don’t want to be separated?” Derek asks, his brow furrowed. “What if… what if they want to learn about chemistry instead of how to make jam?”

Stiles remembers telling Derek about his inedible raspberry jam, and wonders if one day his heart won’t break every time it swells.

Peter pauses for a moment before he answers. “Well, because it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. Why should they pay for students to learn something they’ll never use?”

Derek shakes his head.

“Careful,” Peter smiles. “You’re starting to sound like some of those ridiculous omega rights people in their little online groups.”

Stiles tenses.

Derek shrugs. “So what?”

“You’re a Hale,” Peter says, his smile vanishing. “We’re an old family, and whether you know it or not, people still respect our name. Careful you don’t drag it through the mud.”

Derek pushes his plate away from the table and stands. “Don’t you mean the ashes?”

Stiles twists his head to watch him as he strides out of the room.

  

***

 

Stiles lies still, gaze fixed on the ceiling, as Peter slides a hand into his pants. “Alpha, I don’t want—I mean, I’m not ready.”

Peter drags his fingers lower, and Stiles squirms as they brush his dick. “Shh. You need to get used to my touch, omega.”

 _Omega_. Stiles hates the word. He hates that he’s already starting to respond to it, to recognize it, to react to it like it’s his name and not his fucking classification. “Please, Alpha, I’m not ready!”

Peter moves his fingers lower, and lower still, pressing them against Stiles’s hole. “You will be soon. You’ll be slick for me. Desperate.”

Stiles jerks as Peter pushes a dry finger inside him. He bites his lip to keep from crying out.

Peter laughs and pulls his finger out. He leans over and stares down at Stiles in the gloom. “You’ll beg me to fuck you, just like a good little omega bitch.”

Stiles squeezes his eyes shut as Peter licks a stripe up the side of his face, and then settles back against his own pillow. He keeps one hand on Stiles’s stomach, tracing a pattern there.

“You never did reply to my message, did you, omega?”

Stiles blinks his eyes open. “I don’t know what you mean, Alpha.”

Peter rubs his thumb over Stiles’s sharp hipbone. “Are you sure? I left it where I knew you’d find it. _Happy birthday, MTB_.”


	4. Chapter 4

Stiles wakes up with a headache and a slight fever. At first he thinks it’s because he hardly got any sleep the night before, because Peter _knows_. Peter knows about More Than Biology, and he knows that Stiles is MTB. It’s not until Peter’s slipping another fucking pill in his mouth before he feeds Stiles his breakfast that Stiles realizes the truth: this is the start of his heat.

“You look a little flushed, omega,” Peter smiles knowingly.

“I’m fine, Alpha,” Stiles lies.

As soon as he has the house to himself he sits in a cold shower for an hour, trying pointlessly to bring his body temperature down, to slow his heat. Afterward, he stumbles into Laura’s room and reads the note that Derek has left there for him.

_I will never hate you._

Stiles writes a shaky response: _He knows about MTB._

God, he shouldn’t really be surprised. Peter cuts down anyone who holds a non-traditional view about omegas. Stiles has watched him in action hundreds of times on television debates. And More Than Biology isn’t just some little blog anymore. It’s gotten big. Big enough to attract the attention of a director of the DOR. This whole time when Derek’s been wondering why Peter fucked him over by claiming Stiles, it was Stiles he wanted to fuck over instead.

Maybe there’s a tiny part of Stiles that should be proud of that. Peter Hale felt so threatened by a dumb, helpless omega that he sabotaged his own nephew’s bid for him. But it’s kind of hard to feel proud about the fact that he’s well and truly fucked now.

He’s spiraling rapidly into heat, and, once he’s there, nothing will be the same again. He’ll be exactly what Peter thinks he is: a needy, pathetic little omega begging for his alpha’s cock.

Stiles stumbles downstairs again, and lands on the living room couch. He turns on the television and tries to remember his breathing exercises. It’s been three years since he went through a heat, and he hated every minute of it. He hated losing control. Afterward, he could remember exactly what he’d said and done—lying on the mattress on the floor of the basement, screaming at his dad to _help_ him, to find someone to fuck him, language spewing out of him that he shouldn’t have even known when he was thirteen—but at the time he’d been completely out of control.

He tries to watch a story about omega rights activists, but he can’t concentrate. There’s a headache building at the base of his skull, his skin is hot and it itches, and he’s got an erection. He tries to ignore it for as long as he can, but it’s only minutes before he’s got his pants around his ankles and is jerking off on Peter’s expensive couch.

It’s not fair.

Even coming isn’t enough. It just leaves him shaking and wanting more.

_Fuck._

He takes another cold shower, this time sticking his fingers down his throat. Maybe if he can vomit up the last heat pill, it’ll slow it down. Then he goes through the bathroom cabinets looking for something, anything, that might act as a suppressant. He only finds Tylenol, and takes four at once.

He needs help. He needs his dad.

He needs to find a phone and call his dad.

There’s no fucking landline in the house. Stiles goes into Peter’s study, but the computer is password protected and he can’t even get online. So is Derek’s. Fuck. Lot of trust running through the Hale family, right?

How far is it to town? Three miles? Four? He should just leave. Just walk out the fucking door and keep going.

Except he knows he can’t. Not like this. He’ll end up chained up in some fucking basement, a heat-crazed little fucktoy for some bunch of assholes.

He finds himself back in Laura’s room, digging through her cupboards. Maybe she has a cell phone or something still lying around. It’s a pretty slim chance, but it’s all Stiles has got. For a second he thinks he’s gotten lucky when he pulls out a laptop, but the battery’s long ago run down, and he can’t find the fucking charger anywhere. For a second he wants to scream and punch the walls, before he realizes what a fucking idiot he is. Derek’s laptop’s in his room.

He carries Laura’s laptop into Derek’s room, and plugs it into Derek’s charger.

He sits on the floor, knocking his head gently back against the wall.

_This._

This is why omegas keep having their rights stripped off them. Because when their heat hits them, they can’t even fucking think straight. It’s not fair. If they could just take their suppressants when they wanted, none of this would even matter, but hey, then who would the alphas and betas get to parade around as their little adoring pets?

Omegas were once rare enough that they were a status symbol. And they’re still enough of a minority that there aren’t enough of them to push back. When really, the only thing that separates them from alphas and betas is their heat. Okay, and the fact that the males can carry children as well as the females, but why the fuck should any of that even matter? Which asshole first thought, _Hey, look, a biological anomaly. Let’s strip it of all its legal rights and keep it around to do the housework and to fuck when it’s half out of its mind?_

He crawls forward and opens Laura’s laptop. He hits the start button, and nothing fucking happens.

So much for staying strong.

He’s curled up in a ball on Derek’s floor when Peter finds him.

“Well, I thought you felt a little hot this morning, so I figured I’d come home for lunch.” Peter leans in the doorway and smirks down at him. “What _are_ you doing, omega?”

Stiles blinks up at him. “Wanted… I wanted to go online.”

“To talk to all your little omega friends and sympathizers?” Peter clicks his tongue. “Silly little thing. You don’t need them. You know what you need, don’t you?”

Stiles drops his gaze to Peter’s crotch, and shivers. “Yes, Alpha.”

“Are you slick, baby?”

Stiles nods, stomach twisting.

“Come downstairs.”

Stiles staggers to his feet, wiping his eyes. He tries to remember that he’s his dad’s son, that he’s Scott’s best friend, that he loves Derek, but all of that stuff—all of that suddenly extraneous stuff—floats away, untethered. He sheds his identity like a layer of burning skin. He’s nothing but need. Need and heat and shuddering breaths and mumbled words: _Alpha, please, please_. He’s still lucid enough to know that he’ll hate himself later for this, but right now he doesn’t care.

He follows Peter downstairs, dizzy, off-balance. He stumbles once, and shoulders the wall, and Peter clicks his tongue and steadies him with a hand under his elbow. Stiles leans into him desperately, wanting him more than he’s ever wanted anything, and Peter smiles and dips his head to nuzzle his throat.

“Make it better, please, Alpha. Make it stop.” Stiles’s voice hitches with little panicked sobs.

“Almost there,” Peter tells him, pressing his mouth to Stiles’s throat.

The heat room is in the basement. It’s nicer than the one Stiles had in his basement at home. It’s gloomy and cold, but Stiles knows it’ll seem too bright, too hot, once his heat really kicks in. There’s a large mattress on the floor. Less further to fall than a bed. He supposes he should be glad that Peter is at least progressive enough to go for a mattress. He’s heard horror stories of omegas waking up strapped over breeding benches. There’s a small fridge in the room. Stocked with water and high-protein snacks, hopefully. Something to keep his energy levels up over the next few days, when his body will be pushed way beyond its limits. The only other furniture is a discreet cabinet, and Stiles’s stomach clenches when he realizes what it must contain.

“Clothes off, omega,” Peter tells him, and Stiles struggles to obey. He’s all thumbs. He can’t undo his jeans, and ends up pressed with his back against the wall, panting for breath while Peter does it for him.

“You’re burning up, omega.” Peter sounds pleased.

Stiles lifts a shaky hand to try and touch Peter’s hair, but then Peter’s stepping back from him.

Stiles moans and shifts from foot to foot. “Please. Please.”

Peter arches a brow at him.

Stiles is almost overcome with relief when he realizes what Peter wants from him. He dives for the mattress, and positions himself how they were shown in class: weight resting on his elbows for now, back arched, knees apart, ass open for his alpha. He remembers how humiliating it felt to do it in class. It’s not humiliating now. It’s vital. He’s good. He’s a good omega remembering how to do this, how to present for his alpha, and his alpha will reward him by breeding him, just like he needs.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Peter says, a smile lifting his tone.

Stiles, panting, twists his head to look at the man.

Peter makes a show of looking at his watch. “I _would_ , but I’m expected back at work. But don’t you worry, omega. I’ll be keeping a close eye on you.”

He points upward, and Stiles looks. There’s a camera above the door.

Peter laughs as he locks Stiles in.

 

***

 

There’s a part of Stiles’s brain that knows Peter is punishing him, and every omega out there who thinks like Stiles does. For every one of them who insists they’re more than their biology. Stiles _knows_ , but it doesn’t make a difference.

The cabinet that in any other heat room would be filled with an embarrassingly comprehensive array of plugs and vibrators and other toys to help ease an omega through their heat is empty. Whimpering, Stiles moves onto the fridge. He swallows down half a bottle of water, and douses himself with the other half, because he’s so fucking hot. He lies on the mattress and tries to sleep, but he can’t get comfortable, and he’s aching all over, and he just fucking _needs_.

Jerking off with one hand, the fingers of his other hand shoved inside him, isn’t enough, but it’s all he’s got. He writhes on the mattress, face tear-stained, begging and pleading for Peter to come and breed him.

He hates himself.

He can’t get any relief.

He wants to die.

 

***

 

Typical omega heats can last for up to three days. It feels like three years. Stiles isn’t lucid for most of it. He’s barely conscious. He hurts, and he’s burning up, and he’s weak, and he’s everything everyone says omegas are: a desperate, needy, cock-hungry bitch.

Peter checks on him a few times.

Once, Stiles becomes aware that the door to the heat room is open.

“This,” he hears Peter say. “This is an omega!”

Stiles wails. He’s burning up, his body shaking, slick. He forces his eyes open, and sees Peter standing over him. Sees Derek beside him, his face stricken.

Stiles doesn’t think he’s got any pride left, but he has enough that he feels the last of it shatter. He turns his face into the mattress, sobs hitching. “Please, Alpha, _please_! Please fuck me, please make it stop!”

When he finally looks up again, both of them are gone.

 

***

 

 

It’s Saturday morning when Peter comes to check on Stiles and pronounces him well enough to leave the heat room. He helps Stiles back upstairs, and watches him while he showers. Stiles is too tired and wrung out to be embarrassed. When he’s dry, Peter lets him dress in a pair of sleep pants, and then climb into bed and burrow under the comforter.

Peter pressed a hand to his forehead. “Come downstairs when you’re hungry, omega.”

Stiles nods and curls up tighter. He aches all over.

It’s a few hours before his growling stomach drives him from bed. He wishes he never had to leave it. It’ll be bad enough to put up with Peter’s knowing smirk, but Stiles is pretty sure he never wants Derek to look at him again, not after seeing him at his worst in the heat room.

He stands in front of Peter’s bedroom window for a moment, looking out into the Preserve. All of the windows in the house are huge, floor-to-ceiling, made out of one-way glass so the Hales can look out into the Preserve without anyone looking back inside. Stiles guesses it’s supposed to feel open. Instead, it only makes him acutely aware that he hasn’t been outside in almost a week. He feels trapped in this glass cage.

_Stay strong_ , his dad told him, but for how long? Because if this is the rest of his life…

Stiles groans and presses his forehead to the cool glass.

He misses his dad, and he misses Scott. He misses his old life, even the shitty bits like homework. He misses showing Scott how to work out math problems. He misses arguing with his dad over the crap he eats. He misses arguing with both of them about what to watch on TV. Here, he’s not allowed to be a kid, or a son, or a friend, or an individual. Here he’s just an omega.  

He misses Derek, too. He misses carrying around that secret happiness inside him, the memory of Derek’s chaste kisses and all the things he promised before it all turned sour. He knows it’s not fair, but he doesn’t want to see Derek. Derek can’t make it better. Derek can’t be his salvation anymore. All Derek can be is a spectator, and Stiles really doesn’t want anyone he loves to witness what happens here.

He watches the leaves on the trees outside shivering in the wind for a little while longer, and then heads downstairs. He’s hungry, and he’s not sure how long Peter will be prepared to let him slack off because he’s recovering from his heat.

The house is quiet. The door to Peter’s study is open, and Stiles can hear the soft tapping of a keyboard. In the living room, the television is on. A football game. The volume is down low. Stiles pads silently along to the kitchen. He pours himself an orange juice, then leans over the counter and flips through a recipe book to see if there’s anything he can make for lunch. Maybe club sandwiches? He knows Peter won’t be happy with mac and cheese for every meal, and he doesn’t want Peter to have to order him to do something different. Because if he orders it, and Stiles fails, then Peter has every right to punish him. So Stiles wants to do better before Peter makes it an order, and okay, that’s a lot like capitulation, and it’s probably exactly what Peter wants him to do, but what’s his other option? Seriously, what? Stiles would rather the carrot over the stick any day of the week.

“Stiles?”

Stiles turns to find Derek standing there. He wants to step forward into his arms—it’s felt like the most natural things in the world since the first time he did it—but he can’t. Derek’s right here in front of him, but he _can’t_.

“Are you feeling better?”

Stiles discovers he can’t stand the sight of the concern, and the pity, and the _love_ written all over Derek’s face. He drops his gaze, and wouldn’t Peter be pleased? His little omega, staring at the floor like a good, docile boy. “Yeah.”

“You looked… Yesterday, you looked pretty bad.”

Was it yesterday when Derek saw him with his fingers up his own ass, begging Peter to fuck him? Wet with slick and sweat and cum, writhing in his own mess like a mindless fucking animal? _Pretty bad_ is one way of putting it.

Derek takes a step forward. “Stiles?”

Stiles presses back, the edge of the counter digging into his hip. “I’m sorry you saw that.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I hate it,” Stiles whispers, wrapping his arms around himself.

“It’s not your fault,” Derek repeats.

“I wanted him. Wanted him to, to _f-fuck_ me, and he didn’t because I’m not even good enough for that!” Stiles hugs himself more tightly. “You don’t know what it’s like, how much it _hurts_ , and the only reason he didn’t touch me was because he’s punishing me! Think about that for a second. Think about just how fucked up it is when it feels like torture to _not_ get raped. That’s the fucking reality of being an omega. We can talk all we want about how we’re just the same as other people, but we’re not, are we? You saw. We’re disgusting. You _saw_.”

“That wasn’t you.” Derek sounds unsure, though. Of course he does.

“It was, Der.” Stiles lifts his gaze again. “It was me.”

“No.” Derek raises a hand as if to reach out and touch him, and then drops it again. He reaches into his pocket instead and pulls out his phone. “You’re more than that, remember?”

Once, Stiles thought that maybe a lot of omegas stopped posting on More Than Biology once they turned sixteen because their new mates didn’t allow it. But maybe the trolls were right. Maybe once they got hooked on getting fucked like the dirty little sluts they were, maybe they didn’t believe the stuff Stiles was saying anymore. Or maybe they were too ashamed of how much they’d begged for it. Stiles is. And even now, even when the heat’s gone, there’s a part of him that’s less humiliated by the things he did and said, and more humiliated by the fact that his alpha didn’t want to fuck him. And he knows that’s wrong. He knows the only reason Peter didn’t fuck his ass was because he was too busy fucking with his head, but it doesn’t stop that sick, sad feeling growing stronger and stronger inside him.

He’s a bad omega. His alpha rejected him. He’s bad. He’s _worthless_.

“Look.” Derek holds out his phone.

Stiles takes in, his hand shaking. Derek’s got it open on Twitter. It takes Stiles a second to see what he should be looking it. It’s a list of trending hashtags. Elections, celebrities, a terrorist bombing in Europe, football… and _#whereisMTB._

Stiles’s breath catches as he touches the link and brings up the latest Tweets.

_WTF is MTB lol #whereisMTB_

_Did u guys check behind the couch? #whereisMTB_

_Omega rights rally, Portland, this weekend. #whereisMTB #omega #omegarights_

_My sister is an omega too :( #whereisMTB_

_Bitch got sum dick in him now! #whereisMTB #omegaslut_

_What if it was ur kid? #whereisMTB_

_Fuck dialogue. Its time for action. #whereisMTB #omegarights #betasforomegas_

Derek takes his phone back. That’s good. Stiles thinks he was about to drop it. His head is buzzing. People are talking about him? He’s trending on Twitter? He always figured he’d go viral for one of the dumb Jackass-style stunts he and Scott pulled and posted on Youtube, until Scott’s mom caught on and grounded them both, even though Stiles protested she didn’t have that authority over him… one phone call to his dad later and it totally turned out she did. Stiles and Scott had spent most of elementary school trying to go viral. He’d never thought it’d actually happen. And certainly not over something that actually mattered.

“You matter,” Derek says quietly. “I talked to your dad, and—”

“Derek, what are you doing?” Peter’s voice cuts over him.

Derek shoves his phone in his pocket. “I was checking Stiles is okay.”

“He’s perfectly fine, aren’t you, omega?” Peter clicks his fingers.

Stiles shuffles past Derek and goes to stand at Peter’s side.

Peter smiles and curls his hand around Stiles’s neck. Stiles hates how he relaxes into his touch, like there’s a part of him that’s pleased to be owned. When Peter applies gentle pressure, he goes down onto his knees far too easily.

It doesn’t matter. Knowing that there are people out there talking about him, talking about omega rights, that’s what matters. Stiles knows that while the internet is forever, the kind of momentum that’s somehow built on Twitter needs to be fed to keep going. He’s itching to get back online, to tell the world that he’s still here, that he’s still a human being, and he still has a voice that demands to be heard.

Whatever happens, he won’t let Peter take that away from him.


	5. Chapter 5

That first heat leaves Stiles unsettled. Even after a day or two when he’s back on his feet, when he’s not physically shaky anymore, he’s off-kilter. He misses his dad more than anything. Misses the way that he’d sit on the edge of Stiles’s bed at night, when he felt sick or had woken from a nightmare, and his dad would put his hand between Stiles’s shoulder blades and move it in gentle circles. Stiles could really use his dad right about now. His whole body’s aching for a touch that doesn’t make his skin crawl.

Stiles is becoming two different people. With Peter he’s quiet and biddable, submitting to being touched, and petted, and gently ordered around. A part of him likes it. It’s a little like slipping into warm water. It’s soothing. Everything’s so much easier when he doesn’t have to think.

Except Stiles has never been satisfied with easy.

He hadn’t given up yet. He’s not going to give up. It might look like mindless obedience, but it’s not. Stiles isn’t giving up.

Derek is two different people as well. He’s the beta who lives with Peter, and generally avoids Stiles. He’s also the guy who leaves notes in Laura’s room for Stiles to read every day:

_The site has over eighty thousand subscribers now._

_I love you._

_You dad says to stay strong. I told him you are._

_There are people working to get you out._

_You matter. You will always matter to me._

_I’m sorry. Do what you have to do. It’s not fair, but remember I love you._

Stiles reads the notes a hundred times each before he destroys them. They sustain him. Okay, so Derek won’t give him the password to his computer— _If you post, he’ll see it and punish you_. _He always checks the site_ —but it could be worse. Inside the house, he’s got Derek, and outside…

_There are people working to get you out._

Stiles takes Laura’s notebook out of her desk and starts to write. Maybe he’ll post it one day soon:

_My name is Stiles Stilinski. I am MTB._

He writes a little about his childhood, about losing his mom, about finding out he was an omega. He writes about how awesome his dad and Scott are. He writes about how MTB stands for More Than Biology, and, now, about how it stands for something else as well. It stands for all omegas.

He doesn’t write about Peter, or about his heat. He doesn’t know what to say about either of those things. He writes that he’s scared he’ll be forgotten, that he won’t matter anymore.

Then, his hands shaking, he tears the pages out and shoves them in a shoe in the bottom of Laura’s closet. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever have the courage to post it, let alone the opportunity, but it feels good that he’s written it. He’s still Stiles. He’s still himself, and there’s the proof. Even if nobody will ever see it, there’s the proof.

It’s midway though his second week as Peter’s Hale’s omega when Peter tells him he’s bringing home a guest for dinner the next night. The DOR director from Chicago. Then he surprises Stiles by asking what he thinks he should prepare for dinner.

Stiles’s mind is a blank.

_Do not say mac and cheese._

“Um,” he says at last, foundering.

Peter swats him gently on the ass, smiling. “Go and look through your recipe books, omega, and tell me what you decide.”

 _What_ you _decide._ A small thrill runs through Stiles as he hurries to the kitchen. It’s only once he’s already flicking through the recipes that the sick realization hits him: this is not a choice. At least, it’s not the sort of choice that counts. This isn’t autonomy. This is _insulting._ Stiles rests his head on the counter and groans.

He’s been so deprived of making his own choices that he fell for this hook, line and sinker. A part of him actually thought for a second that Peter was doing him a favor, and he responded like a typical, eager omega.

What the _fuck_ is wrong with him?

He picks up the heavy recipe book and flings it towards the sink in a sudden fit of self-disgust. It knocks over the draining rack, and a few glasses crash to the floor, splintering into pieces.

For a second Stiles just stands there, horrified. Then he spins around to find Peter standing in the kitchen doorway.

“I dropped it!” Stiles exclaims.

“Tell the truth, omega.” Peter’s gaze bores into him.

“It is! I did! I dropped it!”

Peter’s gaze narrows. “You’re a liar. A disrespectful little lying bitch of an omega.”

Stiles wants to back up, even if it means stepping on broken glass. He forces himself to stand still. “I didn’t mean it, Alpha!”

“My study. Now.” Peter turns on his heel sharply.

And Stiles… Stiles _follows_ him, because what the hell else can he do? “I didn’t mean it, Alpha, please, I didn’t!”

“Pants down,” Peter says once they reach his study. “Lean over the desk. You’re going to want to brace yourself, omega.”

“I’m sorry! Please don’t!”

Peter grabs him by the wrist and pulls him toward the desk. Shoves him into position, and wrenches his sleep pants down. He’s not wearing any underwear. Peter likes to be able to just reach inside the loose waistband of the pants and grope his bare ass whenever he feels like it.

Stiles braces his shaking hands on the desk. “I’m sorry! Alpha, I’m sorry!”

“Shut your lying mouth.” Peter moves around to the other side of the desk and opens his drawer. He pulls out a wooden ruler. “Ten for the glasses, I think, and ten for the lie.”

Stiles is sobbing before Peter even moves back around behind him.

“Please! Pl—”

He hears the sharp crack of the ruler against his ass before he feels it. For a fraction of a second he’s shocked into silence, and then it fucking _burns_. He yelps, and tries to arch away from the pain, but Peter grabs him by the back of the neck and forces him down.

“Can’t even take your punishment, can you? You earned this, omega. Remember that. You earned this.”

“Please don’t! Please don’t hurt me! I just want to go home!”

_Crack._

Stiles cries out as Peter hits him again.

“I have been more than patient with you, omega.” _Crack._ “But I think you’ve been coddled long enough.” _Crack._ “If you ever show me any disrespect again, this will seem like a fucking picnic.” _Crack crack crack_.

Stiles’s ass and the backs of his thighs are on fire. Peter’s fingers are digging into his neck, pushing his down, and suddenly Stiles’s shaking arms can’t hold himself up anymore. They give without warning, and Peter slams his head down onto the desk. Stiles feels something in his nose crunch. Tastes blood.

Peter seems more exasperated then concerned. He huffs, and releases his grip on Stiles’s neck. Then takes the opportunity, while Stiles is too woozy to fight, to slam the ruler against his ass another few times.

_Crack crack crack._

Stiles flinches and sobs, dribbling blood on Peter’s desk.

Peter leans over him, his breath hot against Stiles’s ear. “You are a weak, filthy little omega whore. It’s all you ever were, and all you’ll ever be. You can’t even take your punishment like a man, can you?”

Stiles sobs louder.

Peter grabs his ear and twists. “Can you?”

“N-no!”

“Time for another choice, omega.” Peter rubs a hand over Stiles's stinging ass. “You can take the rest of your punishment, or you can get on your knees where you belong, and suck your alpha’s cock.”

Stiles feels as though he’s been doused in freezing water. He breathes heavily against the desk. The pain in his ass, his thighs, and even in his nose seems to recede under the weight of Peter’s awful words. He closes his eyes for a moment.

Stay strong, his dad told him, but it’s not enough. He needs someone to tell him what choice to make here. He loses either way, he knows. There’s no third option. Even if Derek was here instead of working late, there’s no third option. There’s nobody who can help him.

Stiles lifts himself up again, holding his weight on his shaking arms. It would be so easy to just fall to his knees and open his mouth. So easy.

Stiles turns his head so that he can meet Peter’s gaze. “I’ll take the punishment, Alpha.”

Any satisfaction he gets at seeing surprise flicker through Peter’s eyes is very short-lived.

 

***

 

Derek finds him hours later, lying on the couch with a towel under his head so that he doesn’t bleed on the upholstery. It’s late. The house is dark. Peter’s already gone to bed.

Stiles is too tired to cry, so he lets Derek do it for him. Let’s Derek pick him up and carry him up the stairs into the bathroom. He yelps in pain as Derek tries to sit him on the edge of the bath.

“Noooo. Hurts, Der. Hurts.”

“Did he—” Derek doesn’t finish the question.

Stiles slides down onto the floor, onto his stomach. “Hit me. Didn’t fuck me.”

He knows Peter’s saving that for the next time he begs.

Derek takes a warm washcloth and gingerly cleans the blood off Stiles’s face. “He wasn’t always like this.”

Stiles closes his eyes. He really, really doesn’t give a fuck. So what if Peter once loved puppies and rainbows and unicorns? What use is that now?

“Or maybe he was, I don’t know.” Derek dabs carefully at the corner of Stiles’s mouth. “My mom was an alpha too. And Laura. And my dad’s brother Dan. We all lived together. Mom used to joke we were an animal pack, living out here in the woods. Usually it’s hard, with too many alphas living together, but there were enough betas that it didn’t really matter. We could diffuse stuff, you know, before the alphas knocked heads too badly.”

“’megas?” Stiles knows he shouldn’t let Derek touch him, but he can’t bring himself to push him away.

“No.” Derek smiles slightly, the heartbreak written all over his face. “Maybe Matty, my brother, but he was only eleven when the fire happened, so he hadn’t presented yet. He just had this sweet way about him, you know?”

Sweet and docile and biddable. Everything Stiles isn’t.

“After the fire it was only Peter and Laura and me. They fought a lot. Neither of them would back down. If Peter said the sky was blue, Laura would dig her heels in and refuse to admit it.” Derek runs his thumb gently underneath Stiles’s eye, wiping away a tear. “They both drove me mad. But I never thought I’d hate him like I do now.”

“Der, I want to go home. I just want to go home now.” Sobs shake his body. “I want my dad.”

He cried like this for his mom too, once, knowing it was just as impossible.

“I know.” Derek rubs his back just like his dad used to. “I know you do.”

Stiles wishes he could hate Derek for not riding in like a white knight and saving him, but Derek’s just as constrained by the law as everyone. Theft of a claimed omega—because of course it’s always theft according to the law, never liberation—always ends in jail time. Last year in Florida a guy got fifteen years for rescuing his omega sister from her alpha. Fifteen pointless years, since the omega was sent straight back to the asshole anyway.

Sometimes Stiles wishes he was like Jason from school. He wishes that he didn’t hate the system, that he fitted it. Then maybe he could shake his head at all those strange omega rights people too, and get happily back to the housework. Barefoot and pregnant, just how society wants him. And then nobody would have to worry about him, because he’d be _happy_. But he’s wired wrong, or something. He’s defective. A bad omega. What else would explain the fact he didn’t suck Peter’s dick tonight? That he’d rather hurt than submit?

He was just born wrong.

“Stiles?” Derek slides his hand down to the top of Stiles’s pants. “Can I see?”

Stiles lifts his hips.

“Oh, fuck.”

Must look as bad it feels then.

Derek stands up and moves away. Stiles hears the water running in the sink. A moment later he flinches as Derek lays the cold washcloth against his ass.

“I think we’ve got some Arnica here somewhere,” Derek says.

Stiles keeps his eyes closed. Two weeks ago, the idea of Derek touching his ass was a fucking wet dream. Now it’s a nightmare. Even the most gentle touch hurts, and, even when he’s healed Stiles knows it’ll take the humiliation a lot longer to fade than the bruises.

He’s not sure how long he lies there on the bathroom floor. When Derek finally helps him to his feet everything hurts all over again. He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. His nose is swollen, and his eyes are black. His lower lip is busted.

Derek makes him swallow down two Tylenol.

“Do you want to sleep in Laura’s room tonight?”

Stiles shakes his head. Peter left him on the couch, so that’s where he needs to be. He lets Derek help him downstairs again, and lies on his side on the couch.

“Try to sleep, okay?”

Stiles listens to Derek climb the stairs again.

He tries to sleep.

He doesn’t.

 

***

 

It’s the middle of the night when Stiles decides he needs more Tylenol. He can’t handle the thought of the stairs, but he thinks he saw some in the kitchen. He’ll try there first. He’s heading that way when he sees the faint blue glow coming from Peter’s office. The door is open.

Stiles goes in. Peter’s laptop is on standby.

Stiles crosses to the desk, and reaches out to touch the trackpad.

The screen flickers on.

Stiles’s breath catches. It’s on. It’s _online_.

He opens the browser, and it goes straight to More Than Biology.

Oh Jesus.

Stiles goes to the message boards. For a second he’s not sure what he’s seeing. Every single message has the same subject: _Where is MTB?_ At first he thinks the screen is flickering, but then he realizes it’s not. As fast as the messages are being deleted by the admins, new ones are appearing. The exact same message.

Stiles clicks on one to open it.

There’s a video link.

He feels sick, but he has to know.

He clicks on the link.

It’s him. He’s naked in the heat room. He’s covered in sweat and slick and cum. He’s got one hand wrapped around his dick, and the other one shoved halfway up his own ass. He’s writhing and moaning.

_“Please, Alpha! Please! Please come back! Breed me, please! I need your cock! I need you to fuck me! Please, Alpha! Please!”_

 

***

 

It’s cold and dark. Stiles is shivering by the time he gets to the edge of town. He can’t go to his dad. That’s the first place they’ll look. He goes to Scott’s house instead, avoiding any passing cars by ducking into yards and crouching down behind bins. It’s fucking agony every time he has to stand up again, but he doesn’t care.

He’s a runaway omega, and he doesn’t fucking care about that either. The whole world’s seen him with his fingers shoved up his ass, begging like a whore for alpha cock. What the hell is there left to care about?

He’s sobbing with pain, and cold, and humiliation by the time he gets to Scott’s place. He rings the doorbell. Usually he and Scott use each other’s windows, but there’s no way Stiles can make the climb tonight.

God, he hopes Scott is in, and he hasn’t sneaked out to visit Allison.

He presses the doorbell again.

At last the door opens. “Stiles?”

It’s Scott’s mom.

“Please don’t turn me in, Mrs. McCall. Please don’t send me back!”

She bundles him inside. “Stiles, what’s happened?”

Stiles flinches when she turns the light on.

“Oh my god. _Stiles_.” Melissa claps a hand over her mouth.

Stiles sniffles. “Please help me.”

“Oh, honey.” She reaches out and presses her hand against the side of his face. “Of course we will.”

Stiles leans forward into her embrace.

“Mom?” Footsteps clomp down the stairs. “What’s— _Stiles_? What the fuck did he _do_?”

Stiles figures he must look like he’s at death’s door, because Melissa doesn’t even react to Scott’s language.

“Scott, take Stiles up to your bed. I’ll get the first aid kit. Stiles, honey, are you hurt anywhere else?”

Fuck it, right? Everyone else has already seen his ass tonight. Stiles slips his pants down a little.

“I’ll kill him! I’ll _kill_ him!” Scott has never sounded more like an alpha in his life.

“You won’t go near him,” Melissa says firmly. “And neither will you, Stiles. Not again.”

Stiles wants to believe that more than anything in the world. He lets Scott take him up to his room, and settles down in his messy nest of blankets. Scott has always been incapable of sleeping like a normal person. His blankets smell like him, and Stiles relaxes for what feels like the first time in weeks. It probably has been. He’s spent so many nights in Scott’s room that it feels just like home.

Scott sits on the bed beside him, and holds his hand while Melissa checks him over.  Melissa’s a nurse, so she knows what she’s doing.

“Your nose is broken, but I don’t think it needs to be reset.”

Good. Because no way does Stiles want to feel pain like that again.

“You’ve got some deep tissue damage where you’ve been hit. Have you taken anything?”

“Tylenol.”

“Okay. I’ll give you something stronger in the morning.”

Stiles shakes his head. “Can’t stay here. Can’t get you in trouble.”

“What are you going to do?” Scott asks.

“Need some clothes,” Stiles mumbles. “Maybe…maybe I can borrow some cash? I’ll go somewhere. I dunno. I just… I didn’t think. I just had to get away. I _saw_ —I saw what he’s put on the site.”

Scott doesn’t ask, and Stiles’s stomach churns. Of course Scott’s already seen it. So has the entire world. His friends, his family, his teachers, everyone he’s ever met has probably seen it by now.

“I’ll go with you,” Scott says.

“Scott,” Melissa says.

“Mom!”

She sighs. “You two. God. There’s nothing I can say, is there?”

“No,” Scott says firmly. “He’s my brother, Mom.”

“I know.” Melissa brushes her fingers against Stiles’s cheek. “I know.”

 

***

 

“Road trip, bro!” Scott exclaims.

Stiles settles gingerly into the passenger seat of Melissa’s car. It’s not dawn yet, but the night is starting to soften at the edges. He pretends he didn’t see the way Scott hugged Melissa tightly. He pretends he doesn’t know what a big deal this is, and exactly what trouble Scott could get into if they’re caught.

“I am in charge of driving,” Scott tells him, “and you are in charge of the music. But I’m pretty sure you’ll only find old Abba CDs in the glove compartment, because, you know, my mom.”

Stiles can’t believe she gave them the car.

Scott’s hands tighten on the wheel as they back out of the driveway. Then he flashes a grin at Stiles. “So, I’ve told you about crazy Aunt Gloria outside Sonoma, right? She’s not really my aunt, she’s my mom’s aunt. She’s like a million years old and she has chickens, and she names them all. Except she names them all rude words in Spanish. And also all the local kids think she’s a witch. Maybe she is. Anyway, she’s totally cool, and she can drink a sailor under the table, and nobody is going to think to look for us there.”

Stiles plays with the hem of his borrowed hoodie. “You don’t… you don’t have to do this.”

“Dude,” Scott says, showing him a puzzled frown. “You’re my _bro_.”

As though he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Stiles turns his face to the window so Scott doesn’t see him cry.

 


	6. Chapter 6

By the time the sun comes up they’re miles south of Beacon Hills, and Stiles is actually starting to think that maybe they can do this. They get a takeout breakfast and eat it a few miles down the road from the fast food place, pulled off the highway onto a side road to avoid attention. Scott sits on the hood of the car eating his bacon and egg muffin, and Stiles walks slowly around and around the car, stretching his aching muscles and soaking up the sunlight for the first time in weeks.

He can’t believe he ran.

Running is just about the worst thing he could have done. Rationally, he knows that. If he’s caught, Peter will basically be able to punish him any way he sees fit, and the law will be wholly on Peter’s side. So he’s just got to make sure he doesn’t get caught, right? Just got to live under the radar for the rest of his life, buying suppressants from back alley dealers, and hoping nobody recognizes him. He’s just got to hope like hell that Peter will give up looking at some point.

Yeah… because Peter Hale is going to let MTB get the better of him.

Stiles hunches over as he rounds the car again.

“If he finds me,” he begins.

“Dude,” Scott says, frowning. “Don’t even say that, okay? We’re gonna get to Sonoma and learn all the filthy names for Aunt Gloria’s chickens.” His frown deepens. “And then we’re gonna figure out how to get you online again without that fucker tracing us, and you’re taking back More Than Biology!”

“Okay, yeah.” Stiles knows he isn’t ready for that right now, but he wants it eventually. It’ll be a long time before he has any idea about what to post after Peter shared the video of his heat, but he knows he doesn’t want to let that be the last fucking word. Peter Hale doesn’t deserve to have the last word on omega rights. He doesn’t deserve to have the last word on _anything_. “But, you know, if that’s _not_ what happens…”

He can’t actually bring himself to finish the thought.

“Come here.”  Scott slides off the hood so he’s leaning against the car, and reaches out for him. He tugs Stiles into an embrace, letting his friend hide his face in his shoulder.

It was weird, the first time they did this. Scott’s an alpha and Stiles is an omega. It’s never been sexual between them, because _gross_ , but that doesn’t mean that Stiles doesn’t respond to the dynamic. Fucking biology. But he and Scott agreed long ago not to make a big deal out of it. So what if Stiles sometimes needs hugs and Scott needs to be the one giving them? And so what if it makes them both feel good?

“You want to talk about what happened?” Scott asks quietly.

Stiles shifts so that he’s pressed more firmly against him, standing in the gap between Scott’s knees. “I hate it, Scott. I hate it so much. I just want to be left alone. What can’t I just be left alone?”

Scott rubs his back. “I don’t know, man. It’s fucked up. I don’t get it, but I’m a pretty shitty alpha, aren’t I?”

“The shittiest,” Stiles agrees, warmth creeping slowly through him.

“Dude,” Scott says, breath hot on the side of his neck. “We fail so much at life.”

Stiles huffs a quiet laugh.  It doesn’t feel like they’re failing at the moment. It feels like they’ve got this, for once. They’ve just got to hold onto it.

 

***

 

 

It all goes to hell a few hours later outside Santa Rosa.

It starts off in a diner attached to a truck stop. It starts with curly fries and a strawberry milkshake, and Stiles feeling like a human being again for the first time in ages. He makes up some story to the waitress about how he copped a lacrosse stick right in the face, and she winces in sympathy and brings him extra fries on the house. It starts with him and Scott talking shit and giggling like twelve year old kids as they go through all the filthy Spanish words they know. Scott knows _way_ more.

It ends when Stiles sees the highway patrol car pulling in.

In that moment, time stops. Scott’s laughing at something, and one booth over an old woman is slurping her coffee, and the waitress is standing, one hand on her hip, shaking her head at something on whatever soap is playing on the TV.

And two highway cops are getting out of their car.  

“I gotta go to the bathroom,” Stiles says, his heart thumping wildly.

He remembers, when he was about eleven, trying to blow up his neighbor’s mailbox with cherry bombs. Because he was an asshole when he was eleven, okay? He and Scott had shoved a bunch of them in the letter box, and unfurled their homemade fuse, and then it turned out that you couldn’t just make a fuse from a piece of string. So much for that plan. If they wanted the letterbox to blow up, one of them was going to have to get close to it.  Crouching down behind the hedge next door, Stiles had done the right thing. 

 _“Scott,”_ he’d said solemnly, _“you’d better not be here when this goes off. There’s no point in both of us getting in trouble.”_

The same rule applies now, right?

Scott says something around a mouthful of fries, and Stiles smiles and nods. Instead of heading for the bathroom he peels off and wanders through to the half of the place that’s set up like a store. He shuffles down the aisle, hands jammed in his pockets. Tries not to flinch when the buzzer sounds as the front doors roll open and he steps out into the warmth of the day again.

The air smells like gasoline fumes.

Stiles takes two steps before he hears it:

“Hey, kid!”

Goddammit. Why’d the cops head for this entrance instead of going straight in the diner end, where they’d parked?

Stiles knows how to deal with cops. He’s not intimidated by them at all. He’s had the entire Beacon Hill Sheriff’s Department pretty much eating out of his hand since he was a kid. Well, since he lost his mom, he guesses. He spent a lot of time there underfoot then. He knows cops. Of course, apart from a couple of teenage misdemeanors, he’s never actually been on the wrong side of the law before.

He stops, points to himself like he’s surprised. “Me?”

“What happened to your face?” the bigger cop asks him.

“Lacrosse stick,” Stiles says, forcing a grin. “Bam!”

The cop laughs. At his side, the smaller guy scowls, probably itching to get inside and get a coffee. “You gotta be more careful.”

“Tell me about it,” Stiles says. He takes a few steps away from them. Maybe he can hide around the back of the building or something, until they go. Scott won’t leave without him. He’ll see the cops walk in and figure out Stiles is laying low.

The cop laughs again.

“Hey, kid,” the second one says suddenly, eyes narrowed. “You got any ID on you?”

Stiles pats the pockets of his borrowed jeans. “Uh, no, sir.”

The cop steps closer. “Which car is yours?”

Stiles nods in the direction of a semi parked down the far end of the lot. “I hitched.”

“You hitched, huh? Turn out your pockets for me. Where you going anyway, kid?”

“San Francisco,” Stiles lies, tugging his pockets out.

“And where you from?” the cop asks.

“Ukiah,” Stiles tells him. The thing is not to panic. He just needs to keep his story straight, even though his heart’s beating so fast he feels breathless and dizzy.

The cop grabs him by the back of his shirt and turns him around. “Hold still a second, kid.”

Stiles tries not to flinch as the cop pats him down, sliding his hands over the welts on his ass roughly. He glances at the windows of the diner. He can see Scott inside, still eating. Any second now though, and he’ll start wondering why Stiles is taking so long in the bathroom and come looking. Stiles really, really doesn’t need Scott going to jail for helping him.

He knew it was a mistake to run. He doesn’t get to make that choice, and he should have known better. But there’s still one choice here that he can make. He can still choose not to drag Scott down with him.

“My name is Stiles Stilinksi,” he tells the cops. “My mate is Alpha Peter Hale. I ran away. I’m sorry.”

***

 

 

Stiles is taken back to Beacon Hills, under arrest. He’s put in a cell in the Sheriff’s Station. He’s hardly been in there for five minutes before his dad and Peter both turn up, and things really, really go to shit.

His dad takes one look at his face, then turns around and punches Peter— _punches_ him—even though it’s the worst plan ever, but hey, Stiles must’ve inherited all his stupid from somewhere, right?

“You hurt my son!”

Peter reels away, but when he straightens up again, touching the corner of his mouth gently, he’s wearing a smile. “Sheriff.”

Parrish and Tanner are holding his dad back.

Peter’s smile grows. “John, if you’d raised him right, I wouldn’t have had to lay a hand on him. Well, except for when the little slut’s in heat and begging for it, of course.”

His dad roars, and lunges at Peter again. Parrish and Tanner can barely hold him back. “Don’t think I don’t know what this is really about, you asshole!”

Peter’s smile inches wider. “I like you, John. You’re a terrible sheriff, but I like you. You don’t hold back from sharing your opinions, even when you really, really should.” His gaze cuts to Stiles. “Even when most other men in your position would be extremely careful about what they said, if they ever wanted to see their son again.”

It’s not an empty threat. It’s not empty at all. Peter absolutely has the means to carry through. The law is on his side.

His dad sags a little against Parrish. “Don’t hurt my boy. Please.”

“I’m not a monster,” Peter says.

He’s said it twice now, Stiles thinks. He wonders how often Peter has to repeat it, and exactly who it is he’s trying to convince.

“If his behavior improves, you can visit.” Peter lays a hand on the top of Stiles’s head, and Stiles tries not to flinch away. He hugs his knees tighter instead. “Of course, he has a lot of apologizing to do first, don’t you, omega?”

Stiles can’t look at his dad. “Yes, Alpha.”

 

***

 

It’s easy, in a weird way, to worry more about Derek than himself. What’s it like for Derek, listening to Stiles scream? Is he okay? He shouldn’t torture himself for not being able to help. It’s not his fault. It’s Stiles’s fault, all Stiles’s fault.

There’s a dog collar around his throat, and it’s been cinched tight. It’s hard to breathe. Even his screams are weak as Peter lays into him with the ruler. This time it’s not just his ass and thighs. This time it’s every inch of him that Peter can reach.

Peter is out of control.

“You thought you could run from me, you little bitch? Thought you could make me a laughing stock? You thought you could turn my own family against me?”

No. He just wanted to go be _safe_.

He’s a scared kid, and he just wanted to be safe.

 

***

 

Stiles comes slowly back to consciousness in the heat room. He’s lying naked on the mattress, the collar still around his throat. There’s a man kneeling over him. Stiles doesn’t know him, and he jerks in panic.

“Shush,” the man says. “My name is Alan Deaton. I’m a doctor. I’m here to take a look at you.”

Stiles doesn’t know if the man’s soothing tone or if he’s just too hurt to bother fight anymore, but he lets the man examine him.

“You should tell your uncle to be more careful of his things,” Deaton says mildly at last.

Stiles hadn’t realized until then that Derek’s standing in the doorway.

“Peter doesn’t listen to anything I tell him.”

“Hmm.” Deaton’s hands a cool against Stiles’s burning skin. “Nothing broken, but he’s running a fever.”

“I’m going to die,” Stiles mumbles.

Deaton smooths a hand over his forehead. “No, you aren’t, Stiles. You’re a strong boy.”

“I’m going to die in this house.”

Now, or tomorrow, or in ten or twenty years, what’s the difference? Peter Hale is going to hurt him in a million unimaginable ways, because he hates omegas like Stiles in general, because he hates Stiles specifically, and this is his life now. Everything he was, everything he wanted to be, it all ends here. He’s going to die here.

Deaton exchanges a look with Derek. “I’m going to give you some anti-inflammatories and painkillers. Make sure he takes them. No solids for the next two days, but as many liquids as he can manage. Lots of water, and lots of soup.”

Derek nods, his expression tight.

“Keep an eye on him,” Deaton says. “If the fever gets any worse, call me. It won’t help, with his heat coming on again.”

No. That can’t be right. His heat was only a little over a week ago. It’s supposed to be every three months. Even with the heat pills, it’s supposed to only be every three months. Three months is bad enough. “Nooo!”

“Shhh.” Deaton rubs his upper arm gently. “It’s normal. Coming off the suppressants, it’ll be erratic for a while, until your cycle settles.”

Stiles manages to reach for the doctor’s wrist and close his fingers around it. “No. Not again, please.”

“Stiles.” Derek kneels down on the other side of the mattress. “Stiles, look at me.”

Stiles turns his head and blinks through his tears.

“I love you, okay? Whatever happens, I love you.” Derek leans down and brushes his lips against Stile’s forehead, and Stiles lifts a hand to tangle his fingers in his hair. “I love you.”

It’s all he ever wanted from Derek, but it’s not enough. It should be the world, it should be the entire fucking _universe_ , but it’s not. It’s nothing. It’s not even any consolation, because, in the house Stiles is going to die in, love twists into a terrible thing, something with teeth and claws that burrows into Stiles’s chest and threatens to tear him apart from the inside.

 

***

 

“Oh, the famous MTB,” the woman says.

Stiles doesn’t even spare her a glance. He can barely move, and he’s concentrating on not dropping anything. He’s a walking fucking bruise, and he can feel the woman’s speculative gaze sliding over the swollen planes of his body. He wonders if she approves. Of course she does. She the DOR director from Chicago. Another card-carrying member of the group.

She’s an alpha too, naturally. She’s older than Peter. Her blonde hair is graying.

“He looks like he’s caused you some trouble,” she says, and Stiles hears the challenging edge in her tone.

“A little,” Peter says mildly. “But nothing that won’t ultimately be to our benefit. After all, there are plenty of right-minded people out there who’ll be delighted to see that MTB has been taken down a peg or two. And I imagine his little fans will be hastily rethinking their support the moment the pictures are up.”

Stiles makes the mistake of catching Peter’s eye, and seeing his smile.

_I just wanted to be safe._

Stiles didn’t want to be a radical, or a revolutionary, or a rebel. He just wanted to be allowed to choose his own path, the same as everyone else. He doesn’t understand why that’s such a dangerous idea. What’s so fucking special about the status quo that Peter Hale is willing to hurt another human being to preserve it? But of course Peter doesn’t see him as a human being, only as an omega.

“In a year or two when he’s got a few babies to keep him busy, he’ll forget all this nonsense,” Peter continues. “By the time he writes how happy he is to be a good omega, he’ll probably have no followers left at all.”

Stiles’s hands shake, and the plates rattle as he sets them down.

Next time, when he runs, he’ll be smarter about it. He won’t let panic drive him from the house. He’ll have a plan, next time. He’s _smart_. He’ll have a plan, and a contingency plan, and a contingency plan for the contingency plan. And he won’t get Scott or his dad involved. He’ll go it alone, like he should have from the start.

The woman laughs, the sound unaccountably warm. “Oh, don’t pretend this is all for the public good, either. I know this one’s been a thorn in your side for years now.”

 _What?_ Stiles jerks his head up and stares at Peter again.

Peter takes a sip of his wine, chuckling softly. “Well, I won’t deny it. How could I?”

Stiles bites his lower lip. He’s missing something here, he knows. He thinks back to when Peter beat him. _“You thought you could turn my own family against me?”_ Stiles never even knew any of the Hales before Derek. He knew _of_ them, because they were the Hales and Beacon Hills isn’t a big place, but he didn’t know any of them. He thinks maybe Cora Hale was in some of his classes once, but Stiles hardly ever spoke to her. He’s pretty sure he ate half her macaroni necklace back in second grade and she hated him for it, but if anything that would have put her firmly in Peter’s camp.

How has he been a thorn in Peter’s side for years?

He’s known Derek for months, not years, and he never once tried to turn Derek against Peter anyway. He wouldn’t have. He would have come and lived here as Derek’s mate, and been polite to Peter, and he maybe he never would have liked the guy, but he would have kept the peace. For Derek, he would have, even though Derek wouldn’t have asked that of him. He would have done it _because_ Derek didn’t ask.

And now it’s like he doesn’t even have Derek anymore.

He doesn’t have anything.

Peter has broken him very easily. Stiles wouldn’t have even known he was that easy to break. A few beatings, and look at him now. He doesn’t even recognize himself. He’s well and truly cowed.

To look at him, he is. But he hasn’t given up yet. He’s making plans.

He stands back and waits while Peter and the woman eat, and then carries their empty plates into the kitchen. He rinses them off in the sink and loads the dishwater. He counts the pill bottles lined up on the counter. His Adderall, his heat pills, his painkillers, his anti-inflammatories…and his vitamins. The pre-natal vitamins that Peter got from Dr. Deaton and insisted Stiles start taking. Stiles’s skin crawled the way Peter smiled as he watched him swallow that first one down.

Stiles doesn’t want a baby.

He doesn’t want Peter’s baby, especially.

He tries not to think about it as he takes a fresh bottle of wine to the dining room.

It’s just another thing he doesn’t want. Just another thing he probably can’t stop from happening.

 

***

 

In the middle of the night Peter shoves Stiles’s head under the covers. Peter’s drunk, and half-asleep, and Stiles is shivering and sniffling. It takes forever for Peter to come, and when it’s finished Stiles stumbles to the bathroom and washes his mouth out over and over again. He goes downstairs to the kitchen. Takes a can of spaghetti from the pantry and carries it up into Laura’s room. He finds an empty pack in the back of her closet. A big, sturdy thing, she might have used for camping. He sets the can in it and looks at it.

It’s a start.

Next time when he runs, he won’t be unprepared.

He won’t go to Scott, or his dad. He won’t risk anyone else getting in trouble. He’ll go alone, like he should have from the start.

He washes his mouth out once more before going back to the bedroom.

When he finally crawls back in to bed, Peter is snoring.


	7. Chapter 7

Stiles is getting better at cleaning the house. Now he usually has at least an hour in the afternoon to wait until Peter or Derek get home from work. He spends the hour in Laura’s room, listening carefully for the sound of the front door. When he runs, he’ll need to get to a big city. It’s easier to slip under the radar in a big city. San Francisco, he thinks, because he’s always liked it there. His lack of ID will be a problem, but Stiles knows that sooner or later he’ll find someone who can help him out with that.

He thinks of Danny from school. Danny is like a total computer genius. Danny would absolutely be able to set him up with ID and a digital fingerprint in an entirely new name. Not that Stiles can ask him now, but there are plenty of Dannys in the world. Stiles just needs lay low until he can find one.

He needs to take enough food and clothes to get him as far as San Francisco, and then he needs to slip through the cracks and stay hidden. Other omegas have done it. That’s the rumor, anyway. It’s not like any of them have come out and admitted it.

Stiles knows that, apart from his heats, he could pass as a beta. With suppressants, nobody will even be able to tell.

As soon as he gets free, he’ll need suppressants. And then he’ll never have to swallow another damned heat pill or pre-natal vitamin in his life. He’ll pass as a beta, and nobody will even look at him twice. Stiles will decide how MTB ends, not Peter. One day, when he’s safe, he’ll tell other omegas how to do it.

Laura’s pack is already half full. Stiles is wary of taking too much food at once, but he’s been through Laura’s clothes and taken what he can use. Okay, so girl jeans fit him a little weirdly, but they do fit. And who cares if some of her t-shirts are stretched where her boobs would have gone, and shaped wrong for Stiles? He puts them in the pack anyway. He even finds a little bit of cash lying around, and puts that in too. It feels a little wrong, stealing from a dead girl, but it’s not like she’s going to complain, is it?

Finding out her hiking boots fit him is like fucking Christmas.

It’s weird that Peter doesn’t come in here, that both he and Derek keep Laura’s room exactly as it was. Stiles doesn’t question it though. Not when it works in his favor.

Derek still leaves notes on the desk, and Stiles still reads them before he destroys them. It will hurt, leaving Derek behind, but Derek will understand. Stiles knows he will.

Stiles toys with the keying on Laura’s desk. It’s got a square plastic tag on the end that says _I_ _♥ Alfalfa_. Stiles turns the little plastic square over in his hand a few times. The edges are scuffed. Stiles runs his fingers over a gouge in the plastic and then puts the key ring down again as he hears a car approaching.

Derek’s Camaro.

Stiles makes sure Laura’s pack is hidden at the back of the closet again, and closes her bedroom door behind himself as he goes downstairs to meet Derek.

Derek looks like hell.

“Would you like a coffee?” Stiles asks him.

Derek scowls at him. “I can make my own coffee, Stiles!”

Stiles’s stomach clenches. “I know that. I wasn’t asking because I’m an omega. I’m asking because…” _Because I love you._ He catches himself before he says it. “Because you look like you had a bad day.”

“Your dad…” Derek says.

Panic stabs Stiles. “What about my dad?”

“He might lose his job,” Derek says flatly. “Because he punched Peter.”

Stiles’s chest tightens and his throat aches. “That’s not fair!”

They stare at each other across the small space between them. Derek doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say. Nothing about this is fair.

“I can make my own coffee,” Derek says at last, his tone softening.

Stiles sits at the small kitchen table as Derek readies the coffee machine. He thinks of his dad, and how if he hadn’t run it would have been okay. His dad is a great sheriff, and he loves his work. How the hell is he going to pay the bills, or the mortgage, if he doesn’t have a job? If Stiles was a better omega, this never would have happened. Or if Peter wasn’t such a fucking asshole.

He shakes his head to distract himself, and searches for something, _anything_ , to prevent this conversation ending in a flood of tears. He’s tired of crying in front of Derek, when neither of them can make it better. He takes a deep breath and thinks of the little key ring he found in Laura’s room. When he speaks, he forces lightness into his tone. “Was Laura like a vegetarian or something?”

Derek throws him a puzzled look. “No. That’s a weird question.”

Stiles smiles slightly. “I just, um, I found this key ring that said _I love alfalfa_. It seemed kind of random, you know?”

Derek closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them again, he’s smiling too. “It was a gag gift. When we were little and got into fights she’d always yell at me that she was the alpha. Except I couldn’t say alpha when I was five, so I used to call her the alfalfa. Dumb. Anyway, I found that key ring at a farmers’ market a few years ago. She thought it was hilarious.” His smiles fades, leaving nothing behind in his expression but regret. “She would have liked you a lot.”

Stiles wrinkles his nose. “An alpha would have liked _me_?”

“She wasn’t like Peter. You would have liked her too.” Derek hits the button and coffee starts to dribble into his cup, in hissing little spurts. “Actually, you should have seen when Peter got Laura an internship at legal in the DOR. He had all these grand plans about grooming her to be his successor one day. She lasted about a week before she told him to shove the job up his ass. After that he tried to get me to switch from teaching to law, but I wouldn’t, and Laura backed me.”

“He wanted her to take over his job?” A half-formed idea is scratching the back of Stiles’s mind. Something about legal. Something about alfalfa.

“Apparently she was only there long enough to mess around with his files and generally fuck things up.” Derek sets his coffee on the counter. “Do you want me to make you one?”

“What?”

Derek nods at his cup. “A coffee. Do you want one?”

“No.” Coffee makes him sleepy because of his ADHD and his screwed-up brain chemistry. Stiles needs to stay alert. There’s something he’s missing, and he needs to _think_. All the pieces are here, he just needs to let them slide together.

He closes his eyes and breathes. Lets himself _see_.

He thinks of Laura’s computer, and how it wouldn’t start, and how, maybe if it had, he’d have known exactly what was going on here. He’d know exactly how he’s been a thorn in Peter Hale’s side for _years_.

Because alfalfa.

Alfalfa _sprouts_.

His eyes flash open.

Stiles _had_ met one of the Hales before Derek. He just didn’t know it at the time.

“Laura went to law school,” he says, his hands shaking. “Sprout went to law school.”

“Who?”

“When I started the blog, an alpha called Sprout contacted me. She was… she was the _best_ , Der. And she went to law school, and she was going to make things better for omegas. For everyone. And then one day she stopped posting.”

Derek is pale. “When?”

Stiles draws in a shaking breath. “Last year. February last year.”

“That’s when Laura…”

When Laura died.

Peter’s punishing him for turning Laura against him, and Stiles didn’t even fucking know he was doing it.

“This is why he hates me,” he says in a small voice. “This is why he hates MTB so much.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Derek leans back against the counter. “I brought you into this.”

“No.” Stiles shakes his head. Because if he’s right, Peter would have bid on him anyway. Derek was only ever collateral damage. “Der, can you take her laptop and see if anyone can see what’s on it? See if we can be sure it was her?”

Because, if he’s right...

If he’s right, then he was seriously under-fucking-prepared for Peter Hale, and the depth of Peter’s hatred for him.

If he’s right, if Peter is punishing him for having an ally he didn’t even know he had, then Stiles wants to find out everything he can about Laura Hale, the girl who gave him hope when he was a scared newly-presented omega.

He thinks of the pack in her closet, full of her clothes.

The girl who’s still giving him hope now. 

 

 

***

 

 

“Alpha,” Stiles says that night, his heart pounding as Peter’s hand sweeps lazily down his spine, his fingers pressing into bruised flesh. “I’m ready.”

Peter’s hand stills for a moment, the only outward sign of his surprise. When he speaks, his voice is low with amusement. “Really? You’re ready for me to fuck you, are you? Ready for my nephew to hear you scream my name?”

“Yes, Alpha,” Stiles whispers, his stomach twisting.

“Or,” Peter says, shifting closer and exhaling warmly against the back of Stiles’s neck, “are you ready to play the good little whore just because you heard your daddy is going to lose his job?”

Stiles closes his eyes and tries to steady his breathing. He hates how Peter reads him so easily. He hates how Peter is always a step ahead of the game. “Yes.”

“Yes, what?” Peter’s hand slides into his sleep pants, fingers slipping into the cleft of his ass.

“Yes, Alpha, I’m ready to play the whore because my dad is going to lose his job.” He flinches as Peter tugs at the rim of his hole. “Please, Alpha.”

“Ah, if only you’d been this devious and mercenary from the beginning,” Peter says. He pushes a finger inside him. “You might have actually challenged me a little. But you’re mistaken if you think you have any leverage here, omega, because in only a day or two you’ll be begging to give away what you’re trying to use as a bargaining tool right now—this tight little hole.” Peter twists his finger. “I’m not the one here who’s a slave to his biology, am I?”

“No, Alpha,” Stiles says into the pillow, his breath hitching.

“But I will make you a deal, omega.” Peter withdraws his finger. “No more tears, no more lies, no more disobedience, and not only will I allow your father to keep his job, I’ll even let him come and visit you. Would you like that, omega?”

Stiles shivers. “Yes, Alpha!”

He needs to see his dad more than anything. Needs to feel arms around him that don’t make him shudder with disgust. Needs the safe place in those arms where it’s okay if he falls apart, okay if he cries. He needs his dad to promise him he can stay strong.

“I’ll make you work to earn it,” Peter tells him, his voice low with warning.

“Please, Alpha. I’ll do anything you ask.”

“Good boy,” Peter says. “Good little bitch.”

 _Until I run for good_ , Stiles thinks, and forces himself to relax as Peter rubs his hands all over him in the darkness.

 

***

 

The heat hits him in the middle of breakfast a few days later. It comes on suddenly. One minute Stiles is making Peter’s coffee, and the next it’s like the steam from the machine is all over him, choking him, and he can’t breathe. He breaks out in a sweat, suddenly weak, and feels the first awful ooze of slick between his thighs.

Hands shaking, he puts Peter’s cup down on the counter, and trails into the dining room. “Alpha?”

He hates the tremulous tone of his voice. Hates the way his first instinct is to seek Peter out and, when the man opens his arms, it feels like the most natural thing in the world to climb onto his lap. The same hands that beat the shit out of him only a few days ago now raise goose bumps on his bruised skin as they slide down his back.

Stiles is vaguely aware of Derek leaving the table, leaving the room, but he can’t think of anything except his need to get closer to his mate. He rocks his hips back and forth, trying to get some friction on his aching dick.

“Hmm.” Peter nuzzles his throat above the dog collar. “This has come on quickly, hasn’t it?”

Stiles nods and moans.

Peter slips a hand down into Stiles’s sleep pants, into the cleft of his ass, fingers finding the slick leaking out of him. “Oh, you’re nice and wet, omega. Good boy.”

Stiles squirms, trying to get Peter to shove his fingers inside.

Peter laughs against his throat. “Tell me what you need, omega.”

Stiles rocks his hips again. “Need you to fuck me, Alpha, please. Need your cock. Need you to breed me.”

“Have you been good enough to earn my cock, omega?”

“Noooo!” Stiles whines. “I’m sorry, but please, _please_!”

“Wait for me in the heat room,” Peter says.

Stiles climbs off his lap and stumbles out of the room. He feels drunk, he feels sick, and he wants Peter, _needs_ Peter.

“Stiles.”

He moans when Derek grabs him by the shoulders in the hallway, and tries to push past him toward the basement door. “Noooo!”

“Stiles.” Derek is wide-eyed, holding him so he can’t get away. “It’s okay. It’s _okay_. Don’t be scared. Deaton—”

“Let go!” He’s not _scared_. He’s burning up, and he needs his mate. Needs his alpha, not Derek. Not some beta who’s holding him like this, who’s looking at him like there’s something wrong with him, something heartbreaking. He needs _Peter_. “Let go! I need it, _need_ it.”

He shoulders past Derek, and bounces off a wall before he finds his footing again. Then he’s stumbling down the basement steps, trying to shed his pants as he goes. Falling through the door of the heat room onto the mattress, rolling around and tugging the tangle of his pants off his ankles. He’s so wet, his skin’s burning, and he needs this so much. Needs this like oxygen.

“Please,” he moans into the mattress. “Please, Alpha. Not like last time, please.”

He’ll die if Peter doesn’t fuck him. He’ll die.

He sobs with relief when he feels Peter’s hand pressing between his shoulder blades, forcing him down, forcing him to take his weight on his chest.

“Tell me what you need, omega.”

“Need you,” Stiles gasps. He’s burning. He’s shivering. He’s leaking everywhere. “Need your cock, Alpha. Need you to fuck me. Breed me. Please, please, pl—”

It’s so sudden that Stiles arches off the mattress and screams.

There’s pain, more than his body knows how to manage, and Peter’s cock is so big. Stiles jerks and sobs, mindless with the heat, with the pain, with the sudden shock of being breached. He claws his fingers into the mattress, his thighs shaking with the strain of holding himself up for his alpha, and it hurts more than he thought it would. His body trembles, struggling to cope with the thousand contradictory messages overloading his senses: _pain hurt stop please more alpha help no yes more please no please please please_.

He comes. No warning, no build-up, and no real release either. He comes, but he’s still hard, and it still hurts, and he’s confused and afraid and Peter’s still driving into him, still bottoming out, and this is his life now. This is his life.

He sobs into the mattress as Peter fucks him, despair and relief hitting the exact same pitch over and over again.

This is his life.

 

***

 

His heat lasts for three days. Peter is there through it all, fucking him when he can, and shoving plugs and toys in him when he needs a break. Stiles slips in and out of consciousness. Once, he comes to and finds himself riding Peter’s cock, and he doesn’t even remember climbing on top of him. Peter’s fingers are digging into his hips, encouraging him into an undulating rhythm, and Stiles looks down at him and starts crying.

Later, when he’s lying on his back, legs spread, a thick plug pushed up inside his raw ass, Peter takes his time to suck up bruises on his flushed skin. Bruises over bruises over bruises. Stiles writhes underneath him, aching, hurting, and begging brokenly for his cock.

  

***

 

When his heat is over, it’s all different. There’s no going back now. The last few hours in the heat room, Peter rests with his hand splayed possessively over Stiles’s abdomen, and Stiles feels sick at the thought of life growing in there. He feels sick because Peter is suddenly so much nicer to him, so much more solicitous. His touches are gentle, almost affectionate.

So.

One day a punching bag, the next day an incubator.

In the morning, Stiles limps into the shower and jabs his fingers into his abdomen until it hurts. _No no no. There’s nothing there. No._

But how much of it is wishful thinking?

Stiles dries himself and dresses, and avoids looking at his reflection as he does. At breakfast, he kneels next to Peter’s chair and leans wearily into his touch.

“How are you feeling, sweetheart?” Peter asks him.

He’s tired. He aches. He wants to cry, but it’s not all from misery. There’s a heavy weight of relief inside him as well.

“Sleepy,” he whispers at last.

Peter rubs a thumb along his cheekbone. “Make sure you eat today, omega. You need to keep your strength up, if you’re pregnant.”

Stiles nods, his eyes closing slowly. He should be disgusted, he knows. He should be angry. But he’s too tired for that, and his alpha’s approval, his alpha’s concern, makes him feel warm and drowsy and content.

“It’s been one heat, Peter,” Derek says, his tone sharp. “He might not be pregnant.”

“Omegas are notoriously fertile,” Peter answers lazily, sliding his thumb along Stiles’s lower lip. “And alphas are incredibly virile. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s already carrying my child.”

Stiles opens his mouth and sucks Peter’s thumb obediently.

“He’s a child himself.” Derek’s voice is sharp.

“Don’t play that card with me, Derek,” Peter says. “You would have fucked him too, if you’d been given him.”

“Not like that!”

Peter laughs, the sound low and amused. “You know, I actually believe you. You would have let him take his suppressants and denied yourself the pleasure of fucking an omega in heat, just to make some stupid point, wouldn’t you?” He pulls his thumb free. “Aren’t you glad I bid for you instead, omega?”

Stiles nods and moans.

After breakfast, Peter makes sure he takes his pre-natal vitamin before he leaves for work.

“Stiles,” Derek says, his bag slung over his shoulder, his face the picture of misery.

Stiles ignores him and trails away.

He’s empty. His heat has left him physically exhausted, and he hasn’t got the energy to fight anymore. He can’t look at Derek, and carry the weight of his misery on top of everything else. He can’t even bring himself to think of Laura, and the pack in her closet. He can barely drag himself to the living room couch.

Derek doesn’t try and talk to him again. A few minutes later, the front door opens and closes as Derek leaves for work as well.

 _Where is MTB?_ Stiles wonders. He looks at the remote control on the coffee table, but doesn’t bother turn the TV on.

Where is MTB?

Gone.

He’s gone, and only the omega is left.

Stiles is too tired to care.


	8. Chapter 8

Two days after his heat, on a Sunday, Stiles is helping Peter pack for a trip to New York. Peter will be keynote speaker at a forum on omega education reform. It’s the sort of topic that should kickstart a low burning anger in Stiles’s gut, but doesn’t. He folds Peter’s shirts carefully into his suitcase and smooths them down with his hand.

“Good boy,” Peter says, stepping up behind him. He slides his hands around Stiles’s waist and buries his face in his throat. Stiles closes his eyes. “Don’t forget to take your vitamins when I’m gone.”

“I won’t, Alpha.”

“You’re going to make big, strong babies, aren’t you?” Peter leans around and kisses him on the cheek.

Stiles smiles, pleasure blooming inside him. “Yes, Alpha.”

“Such a good omega.” Peter’s smile grows. “Don’t have too much fun without me.”

When Peter’s gone, the house seems empty. Stiles drags the cleaning equipment out of the closet in the hall and starts work. He hums to himself as he starts on the windows in the living room, turning up his nose at the smell of the cleaning fluid.

Derek’s at home too, but they haven’t talked since Stiles’s heat. Derek left a note in Laura’s room— _Are you ok?_ —but Stiles didn’t answer him. He hasn’t even put anything in Laura’s pack since his heat. It’s there, if he needs it, but he just doesn’t feel that desperate need to get away. Not now when Peter’s being so nice.

 _Or maybe,_ a voice in the back of his head tells him, _not now when you’re being so docile._

There’s a note of spite in that voice, and Stiles doesn’t know why. He’s changed. People change. And if everyone’s happy, what does it matter? How is it losing the fight if he’s content? Why shouldn’t be capitulate, if it’s what he wants?

He presses his fingers against his abdomen.

Because it’s _not_ what he wants.

He’s sixteen. He doesn’t want a mate or a baby. He wants to stay up late and play video games. He wants to talk shit with Scott. He wants to go to school and get detentions for playing up in class. He doesn’t want this. He _shouldn’t_ want this.

He feels like he’s losing his grip.

He throws himself into the housework, into keeping busy so that he doesn’t have time to think, to worry, or to second-guess himself. The idea of doing this every day while a baby burbles in the background is both comforting and terrifying. What if it’s an omega like him? What if it’s an alpha? What if it sees the way Peter treats him, and thinks that’s the way things should be? Stiles can’t have a baby. He can’t raise a child in this house, and watch it turn against him.

Derek arrives home early from work, his messenger bag decorated with tiny glittery stickers courtesy of the kids in his class. Stiles has a coffee waiting for him before he even toes his shoes off.

“I’ve invited a guest for dinner,” he says.

Stiles nods, and worries he has nothing prepared.

“It’s your dad,” Derek says. Then, when Stiles is frozen to the spot, he repeats it: “It’s your dad.”

Stiles’s breath hitches. “I can’t, um… there’s not enough time to thaw another steak, and—“ Panic threatens to overwhelm him. “I can’t—I can’t see him. Does Peter know?”

“Peter knows.”

“Wh-why—” Why wouldn’t Peter tell him?

“He’ll be here soon,” Derek says. “Stiles, don’t worry about dinner. I’ll make something. You should go and put a shirt on, okay? Go upstairs and find one of Peter’s shirts, and put it on.”

Stiles looks down at himself. He’s wearing nothing but a pair of sleep pants that hang loosely on his hips, and his skin’s marked all over with the bruises that Peter’s spent days sucking up. The thought of his dad seeing him like this turns his stomach. Then again, there’s no shirt in the world big enough to cover his shame, is there?

He hurries upstairs, and pulls a shirt from the bottom of Peter’s dresser. It’s baggy on him. He tugs the sleeves down over his wrists, but that just pulls it off one shoulder, exposing a swathe of mottled skin. Stiles hitches it up again, and stares at the dark ring of bruises around his right wrist that appeared somehow during his heat. The bruises are fading, yellowing. They’re stark against his pale skin.

Sudden panic seizes him. He can’t see his dad. Not like this. Not still bearing the marks of Peter’s rage after his aborted escape attempt. And, worse, the marks of being claimed by his mate.

He finds himself, just like on that first day, hiding on the floor of the closet where the cleaning supplies are kept. Arms wrapped around his drawn-up legs, head buried in his knees. Distantly, he can hear Derek clattering around in the kitchen. Then, later, the chime of the doorbell.

He holds his breath and tears squeeze out from underneath his eyelids.

Footsteps approach the closet. “Stiles? Your dad’s here.”

Stiles huddles over. “No! I don’t want to see him!”

Derek’s footsteps move away again.

Minutes later, a weight slides down the closet door. “Kiddo?” his dad asks.

Stiles jerks and sobs.

“Oh, kid.” His dad’s fingers slide under the closet door, just like Derek’s did on that first day, and Stiles reaches out tentatively and touches them. “Oh, Stiles.”

Stiles wipes his face furiously with his free hand.

“Been a while since we did this, huh?”

And Stiles suddenly remembers. His mom was dead, and the world was horrible and loud and cruel and _wrong_ , and Stiles had hidden in a closet then too. His parents’ closet, because his mom’s clothes were still hanging in it, and they smelled a little bit like her. Stiles liked to comfort himself with them as much as he needed to torture himself with them, sliding the fabric over his face and crying because her dresses were as thin and insubstantial as ghosts. He’d wanted to feel her, a solid shape, but all he had was _this_.

His dad had spent hours sitting outside the closet door talking to him, telling him stories about his mom that Stiles had never heard before, his voice rough with tears.

 _“Come out of there, kiddo, please,”_ he’d said at last. _“I really need a hug right now.”_

“Been a while,” Stiles whispers now.

His dad’s finger twitch against his own. “Can I see you, kid?”

Stiles freezes.

His dad is silent for a long while. Then, he sighs; a low, drawn-out weary sound. “Oh, Jesus, Stiles.”

They both sit there silently, the closet door between them. At last Stiles moves, and pushes the door open a crack. That’s all it takes. His dad wrenches it all the way open, and suddenly Stiles is crawling forward into his embrace, and his dad’s arms are around him, and Stiles is crying—they’re both crying—and then his dad is holding him back, looking him up and down, his face crumpled with horror, with heartbreak, and Stiles is choking on his own breath.

“Okay,” he dad says at last. “Okay.”

It’s not though. Stiles knows his dad can see everything that Peter’s done to him, and suddenly he’s babbling: “Dad, Dad, I’m sorry. Shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have _run_ , and then I wanted him, and it hurt so much, I needed it so much, and I’m sorry! Dad, I’m sorry!”

His dad embraces him again, rocking him back and forth like he’s a baby, and making shushing sounds in his ear. “It’s okay, kid. It’s okay.”

Stiles blinks through his tears and looks over his dad’s shoulder to see Derek standing there. Derek wipes his eyes with his hand, and turns and heads back to the kitchen.

Stiles and his dad stay on the floor in the hallway, until Stiles can finally breathe again.

 

***

 

It feels weird, sitting at the table.

 _Like a real human being_ , Stiles thinks, dragging his fork through his mac and cheese. Derek made mac and cheese.

“He’s off his suppressants,” Derek tells Stiles’s dad. “He’s still taking his Adderall. Peter also has him on heat pills.”

“And my vitamins,” Stiles adds, his stomach twisting. “Pre-natal vitamins.”

His dad and Derek exchange a glance.

Stiles stabs at a piece of macaroni. “Because I’m a good little omega now! Just a good little fucking breeder!”

“You’re more than that,” Derek says in a low voice.

“How exactly am I more than that?” Stiles demands, anger rising in him. And it feels so good to be angry again. So fucking good. “ _How_ , Derek?”

Derek flinches.

“Stiles,” his dad says, and reaches out and puts his hand on his forearm. “We need to talk about Laura.”

“Laura?”

“Derek told me Laura might be that alpha you talked to.”

“Sprout,” Stiles says, swallowing.

“Derek gave me her laptop. I’ve sent it to the lab to see if they can get anything off it.” His dad’s face is grave. “Stiles, what do you know about Laura’s death?”

Stiles looks at Derek. They talked about it a few times. “Not much. She was at school in Berkeley.”

“I got a notification from the police in Berkeley,” his dad says. “They wanted me to do the death message. You know what that is?”

Stiles nods. The thing his dad hates most about his job. Knocking on doors in the middle of the night to destroy people’s lives by telling them their kid has wrapped his car around a tree, or overdosed at a party on the other side of the country. Or that she’s been stabbed to death in a mugging gone wrong.

“I drove out here at three in the morning, and there was nobody home.” His dad shrugs. “Tried again the next morning, and Peter was here. That was that.”

“He said he was in Beacon Hills that night,” Derek says, his brows drawn together. “He was supposed to be here.”

Stiles wants to laugh. “What are you saying? You think Peter— It’s hardly a smoking gun!”

"It's something, kid. Peter's not... Peter's got a lot of secrets, okay?" His dad’s face is grave. “When he bid on you, I called in some favors. I’ve seen Derek’s bid. There was nothing wrong with it, no reason for it not to get passed onto me. I thought maybe there might be a way to get you back if I showed the bid process was flawed.”

“But there’s not,” Stiles says flatly, refusing to allow even a spark of hope.

“There’s not,” his dad agrees with a frown. “The DOR has discretionary power over the bidding process. But I’ve got a lawyer now, and—”

“A lawyer? How can you afford a lawyer?”

“That’s none of your business, Stiles.”

“Dad!”

His dad frowns at him. “I took a second mortgage on the house, okay?”

“Oh, Jesus. Dad! You’re probably gonna lose your job, and you took out a second mortgage?” Stiles wants to bury his face in his hands. “Why would you _do_ that?”

“You let me worry about my finances, okay, kid?” His dad shakes his head. “Anyway, when I was asking around about Peter, I did turn up something else. You remember Rafael McCall, Scott’s dad?”

“That asshole, sure.” He remembers the way Scott used to look forward to spending weekends and holidays with his dad, only to get a call at the last minute that something had come up.

“He contacted me, wanting to know why I was suddenly so interested in Peter. Turns out the FBI is too.”

“Are you serious? Why the hell would the FBI suddenly care about omegas?”

His dad shows him a bitter smile. “They don’t care about omegas, Stiles. They care about embezzlement.”

Stiles’s jaw drops. He feels a little sick. Is Peter in _trouble_? Stiles shakes the tendril of worry off. Fuck his biology. Fuck his connection to his mate. If Peter’s in trouble, Stiles will throw a goddamn party. “He’s ripping off the DOR?”

“They have no proof,” Derek interjects.

“If Peter goes to jail, what happens to me?”

“You stay here with me,” Derek says. “You’re still his omega.”

“That’s bullshit! That’s total bullshit!”

“And it’s premature,” the sheriff says in a warning tone. “The FBI doesn’t have any evidence. Only rumors. It’s an ongoing investigation, kid. It’s been months. It could be years yet.”

Stiles exhales slowly. He’s not sure he can wait years. He thinks of Laura’s pack. It feels like a gamble now. If he can wait this thing out, maybe he won’t have to run. Maybe Peter will go to jail, and, sure, Stiles will still be his omega, but he’ll be living here with Derek, and they can both pretend Peter doesn’t exist. Can’t they?

But there’s no guarantee Peter will go to jail.

But if Stiles runs, even if he makes it, he’ll never be able to come back to Beacon Hills.

He frowns at his plate for a long while, then finally lifts his gaze again. “You think… you think Peter hurt Laura? That he killed her?”

His dad’s a cop. It’s his job to think shit like that. But Derek’s face is serious too.

“Maybe,” Derek says at last, the word bitten off sharply like it costs him an effort just to say it.

“What am I supposed to do?” Stiles asks, looking between them. “I don’t want to be like selfish or anything, fuck, and I’m so sorry, Der, I really am, but you’ve just told me you think my alpha is a fucking killer. You’ve seriously just dropped that on me. This is the guy who can legally beat the living shit out of me if he doesn’t like the way I _look_ at him, and he already hates me, so what am I supposed to do?”

“We’re going to get you out of this,” his dad says. “You just need to stay here, and keep your head down. You need to stay strong. Can you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

 _Stay here,_ his dad said, like he knows. Of course he knows. And it’s not like his dad wants him to stay with Peter, he just knows the alternative—if he runs again and gets caught again—is so much worse. Stiles’s face burns as his dad’s gaze drops to the collar around his neck.

Stiles has read stories about omegas who’ve been hobbled, deliberately crippled because they ran. No law against it. Maybe most people don’t approve of it, but that’s only because it reflects badly on an alpha to have an uncontrollable omega. It’s unseemly. Not cruel. Unseemly. He’s read stories about omegas who are kept in chains. This one kid was blinded so he couldn’t keep running.

When it comes to omegas, the law is on Peter’s side.

It’s why his dad doesn’t want him to run. It’s why Stiles hasn’t asked Derek to help him. Not because he might make it, but because he might not.

“Are people still talking about MTB?” he asks at last.

His dad smiles slightly. “Talking about you. Shouting from the rooftops, some of them.”

“For what good it does,” Stiles murmurs.

“It does good,” Derek says suddenly. “They know who you are now. They know your face.”

Shit. Probably another reason running won’t work.

Derek didn’t mean it like that, though, Stiles knows. He means that the omega rights movement has a focus now, and it’s Stiles Stilinski. He wonders if that makes him safer, with people watching, or if it will only drive Peter on to greater cruelty. Just to make a point.

“Did he post my last heat?” he asks.

Derek’s expression tightens.

“Of course he fucking did.” Stiles blinks back hot tears. “Of course.” He clears his throat. “Is Scott okay?”

His dad looks pathetically glad for the change of subject. “He’s not great. He knows why you did it, but he’s kind of a mess.”

“He’s always been kind of a mess,” Stiles says with a grin he doesn’t feel.

“Yeah,” his dad says gruffly. “He’s a good friend though.”

“The best.” Stiles’s chest is tight. His throat hurts. “He’s not in any trouble?”

“Nobody knows you were with him.”

“Good. That’s good.” He falls silent again, and scrapes his fork around his plate for a while. “Dad?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“I don’t think I can handle this much longer. You said to be strong, but…” He shakes his head. “But I _want_ him, okay? He’s an alpha, and he’s my mate, and every fucking part of me is telling me to just submit, to just go with whatever he wants, to just be happy. What if I’m not more than my biology?”

“I think you are,” his dad says softly.

“But what if I’m not? What if I can’t be?” He closes his eyes for a moment. His dad and Derek are betas. They don’t know what it’s like to be an omega, to feel the pull toward a mate in the way that only an omega can. Because every cell in Stiles’s body thrums with the knowledge that he is mated, that he belongs to Peter Hale, and to push back against that…it feels bad, and wrong, and frightening. “I hate him. I _hate_ him, but it’s like I’ve imprinted on him now, or something. I’m like a fucking baby duck.”

He opens his eyes and looks at Derek.

It should have been Derek he felt this for. It would have been, if Peter had left him alone. All his genuine love for Derek would have been enhanced by his omega instincts, not subsumed by them, and it would have been something wonderful.

He still loves Derek, but a part of him wishes he didn’t. All they have left now is the slow disintegration of their relationship, as Peter takes it apart piece by piece, and watches them both suffer for it.

“You could get me out of here, Der,” he says in a quiet voice, even though he knows it’s unfair, he knows it’s hurtful. “You and me, we could get in your car and just drive.”

He hates himself the moment the words are out, because Derek’s face just crumples. “Stiles…”

“I know!” Anger boils up in him. “I know, okay? I know it’s impossible! I don’t need you to explain it to me like I’m a child!”

Derek holds his gaze. “If I thought we could do it, I already would have.”

“That’s not much fucking consolation!”

Derek’s brows tug together. “I know.”

They finish their dinner in silence.

 

***

 

His dad doesn’t want to let him go, but Stiles fakes a grin and promises he’ll be okay. Promises he’ll be strong. Then he finds himself on the couch next to Derek, watching some stupid movie on TV. He finds himself listening to the rhythm of Derek’s breathing, and inching closer and closer to him until their thighs are pressing together, and Derek’s warmth is seeping into his skin.

“Stiles,” Derek murmurs.

Not a warning tone. A defeated one.

“Just let me have this, okay?” Stiles leans closer, until his head is resting against Derek’s shoulder, and Derek’s arm is around him.

He knows he shouldn’t touch, but it’s not sexual. It could be, if either of them was brave enough, but at the moment it’s about warmth and comfort and closeness.

“Do you really think Peter killed Laura?”

“I don’t know.” Derek closes his eyes briefly. “I thought I knew him, but maybe the fire changed him, or maybe I never really did.”

“Is that why he doesn’t go into Laura’s room? Guilt?”

“Maybe. God, I wish I could just ask him, you know? Just grab him by the shoulders and ask if he had anything to do with it. But I’m so terrified to make him angry these days.”

“Because of me,” Stiles whispers.

Derek strokes his fingers gently along the nape of Stiles’s neck. “Because of you.”

“What I said before at dinner, about us just getting in your car and going…” Stiles can’t finish the thought, because he’s not sure where it will take him.

Derek leans down and presses his lips against Stiles’s temple. “Eighty-six percent of runaway omegas are returned to their mates within fourteen days. Twelve percent are returned within the year.”

“What about the other two percent?”

“It’s two percent,” Derek says. “I can’t risk you on those odds.”

“I want to post again,” Stiles tells him. “I want people to know I’m still here.”

“Stiles, he’ll _know_ , and he’ll punish you for it. And if anyone posts on your behalf, he’ll punish you for it.”

Stiles balls his hands into fists. “I need _something_ , Der! I need something so that I remember who I am, okay? So that I know there’s more to me than being Peter’s docile little omega! I feel like I’m treading water at the moment, with no land in sight, and pretty soon I’m just going to give up and start sinking!”

Derek holds him more tightly. “Then tell me what I can do to help you.”

“I don’t know,” Stiles says quietly. “I don’t know if there’s anything.”

He closes his eyes as Derek kisses his temple again, and wonders if that will be enough to keep him afloat.

 


	9. Chapter 9

Fucking outside of heat doesn’t feel the same. When Peter’s inside him, Stiles doesn’t feel the same desperate sobbing need clawing at him. Instead, he has to work on not letting his disgust show when Peter touches him and kisses him, even though it doesn’t feel bad. That’s the problem, he thinks. It doesn’t feel bad, and it _should_. If there was any justice in the world, his skin would crawl when Peter touched him, and the feel of the man’s cock inside him would sicken him. It turns out the only thing Stiles is sickened by is himself, by his own complicity in the act. He hates how Peter can make him squirm and moan and come so hard he can hardly breathe afterward.

When Peter’s finished, when he’s rolled off Stiles and started snoring, Stiles stumbles on shaky legs to the bathroom and cleans himself up. When he’s done he splashes water on his face until the droplets are running down his cheeks and he can’t tell that he’s crying anymore.

He doesn’t even know if he’s crying for himself, or for Derek, or for Laura.

He’s a fucking mess.

This is his life.

If his dad and Derek can’t get him out, if the FBI can’t put Peter away, this is his life.

Stiles sees it stretching out in front of him, every day the same, until one day he won’t even feel the self-hatred and humiliation anymore. Then he’ll be numb. And, after that, he’ll be happy, won’t he? His biology will have chipped away at the last defenses of his identity, and he’ll be a happy fucking slave. He’ll be so different he won’t even remember why he used to fight it.

He climbs back into bed beside Peter and tries to sleep.

He doesn’t.

He spends the night worrying that the man snoring beside him isn’t just a monster, but a killer too.

He’s dozy and sluggish when the alarm chirps at him in the morning. He wants to get out of bed and get started on Peter and Derek’s breakfast, but the alarm wakes Peter as well, and Peter keeps him in bed for a while so that he can suck bruises up onto his skin. Then he drags Stiles into the bathroom with him so that Stiles can blow him in the shower.

“Borrow one of my shirts and find your shoes, omega,” Peter tells him as he towels off. “You’ve got a doctor’s appointment this morning.”

Stiles rubs his abdomen self-consciously, and Peter’s mouth curls into a possessive smile.

“Fingers crossed, hmm?”

“Yes, Alpha,” Stiles answers automatically, then worries it might be the truth.

He’s itching with barely-suppressed excitement on the drive into Beacon Hills. He doesn’t even realize his leg is jiggling until Peter makes a disapproving noise and puts a hand on his thigh.

“Sorry, Alpha,” he murmurs, eyes wide to drink in the scenery.

A trip to town shouldn’t feel as exhilarating, but it’s been so long since Stiles has left the house. His heart beats faster as they drive past the Sheriff’s Station, and he wonders if his dad’s inside. He thinks of the last time he was there, before Peter was in his life at least. He’d turned up a few days before his birthday with a box of cupcakes for the deputies. Because donuts are a cliché.

Dr. Deaton’s office is a block back from the station. Stiles sits beside Peter in the waiting room and looks at the aquarium on the wall. It’s full of goldfish, and those tiny bright little neons that appear almost translucent as they zip back and forth behind the glass. Stiles swallows down the anxiety rising in him, and reaches for a magazine to read.

The cover catches his eye. _Who is MTB? What you need to know about omega rights, page 27._ His hands shake.

Peter takes the magazine off him and puts it back on the table.

Stiles watches the fish until the nurse calls them into Dr. Deaton’s office.

The last time Stiles saw the man, he was half out of his mind with pain. A beaten, broken animal. Stiles feels heat rise up the back of his neck as Dr. Deaton nods at him.

“Omega, if you’ll undress, please.”

Peter takes a seat beside the doctor’s desk.

Stiles turns his back and peels his clothes off, then shuffles over to the paper-covered examination table.

“His bruises have healed quite well,” Dr. Deaton says mildly, tapping his gloved fingers against Stiles’s ribs.

Peter arches a brow. “That’s not what I’m here for, Alan.”

“It’s no extra cost, Alpha,” Deaton says. His tone is mild and unaffected, but Stiles catches his gaze and likes to imagine there’s an insult wrapped up in there somewhere.

Peter rolls his eyes.

“Lie down on the table, omega,” Deaton says. “We’ll take some blood first, then give you a full examination.”

Stiles wants to cringe with embarrassment. The paper crinkles as he climbs awkwardly up onto the table. He turns his head away and stares at the wall as Deaton approaches him with a syringe and a rubber tube.

“You don’t like needles?” Deaton asks, his voice sympathetic.

“Pretty sure nobody _likes_ them,” Stiles answers.

Deaton’s laugh seems genuine. “You can close your eyes if you like. You’ll only feel a little pinch.”

That is always such a lie. Stiles squeezes his eyes shut. A pinch feels like… a pinch. And a sharp piece of metal getting shoved into his vein feels like a sharp piece of metal getting shoved into his vein. It’s the actual blood taking that Stiles hates the most though. He doesn’t know if it’s his imagination or not, but it’s like he can feel the suction of the syringe, pulling against the suction of his heart, fighting against his body and making him dizzy.

“That’s it,” Deaton says at last. He withdraws the syringe and presses a cotton pad against the inside of Stiles’s elbow. “Good. Hold that there for me.”

Stiles puts his thumb against it.

Deaton comes back with a Band-Aid and tapes it over the tiny wound. “We’ll send this up to the lab, and see what the result is.”

“How soon will I know?” Peter asks.

Deaton checks his watch. “The lab’s in the building. If they aren’t busy, we could have a result within fifteen minutes.” He catches Peter’s look and says, mildly, “I’ll make sure they aren’t busy.”

A nurse comes to collect the blood sample. She doesn’t spare Stiles a glance.

Deaton smiles at him softly. “Well, let’s have a look at you then.”

Stiles stares at the wall again, at some poster with a cartoon blood drop on it, while Deaton presses his fingers into his abdomen gently. He wonders what the doctor is feeling for. Changes in his body, maybe. Something that’s shifted inside him to make room for a baby to grow.

Stiles knows the biology. In male omegas, during heat, the body changes. There’s a pocket inside him, usually as redundant as his appendix, that, if he’s impregnated, mimics a womb and can sustain a pregnancy. It’s an anomaly, a mutation. Male omegas can’t deliver babies without surgical intervention. It’s why so many of them used to die a few centuries ago. Why so many of them, a few centuries before that, were burned at the stake for being unnatural; demons, devils, or something. Stiles wonders if things are really that much better today.

“Hmm,” Deaton says. “Place your feet in the stirrups for me, please.”

Stiles obeys, closing his eyes as his face burns.

God.

Why the fuck does he have to—

He flinches as the doctor touches him.

“Take deep breaths for me,” Deaton says, and Stiles wonders what difference that will make, before he realizes the doctor’s trying to talk him down from his rising panic. “He has a little swelling, Alpha Hale. I would recommend you abstain from penetrative intercourse for at least a week, until he’s more comfortable.”

“I’ll be sure to take that under advisement,” Peter says. Even with his eyes closed, Stiles can hear the smirk in his voice.

When Deaton’s finished, Stiles hurries to get dressed again. Then he sits beside Peter and stares numbly at the pattern on the carpet. Peter’s hand curls around the back of his neck, his thumb rubbing a soothing pattern into the knot at the top of Stiles’s spine. Stiles leans into his touch.

“Excuse me a moment,” Deaton says. “I’ll go and check the lab results.”

He leaves his office.

Stiles curls over in his seat, his heart beating faster. A part of him aches for his test to be positive, to cement the bond between him and his mate, but he’s sixteen, and this is _Peter_. Peter is a monster.

But Jesus. He still wants it.

It seems to take forever until Deaton returns, and Stiles looks up, his throat dry, and tries to read the doctor’s inscrutable fucking expression.

“Alpha Hale,” the doctor says, the fine lines around his eyes tightening. “I’m sorry.”

 

***

 

In the car on the way home, Stiles echoes Deaton in a small, shaky voice: “I’m sorry.”

Peter stares out the windshield, and smiles in a distracted way. “Are you, omega?”

“Yes,” Stiles whispers. It’s true. Peter’s obvious disappointment washes over Stiles and transforms into something else: guilt. Stiles feels as though he’s failed his mate, and the weight of that failure is pressing heavily down on his chest. He blinks, and a tear slides down his cheek before he wipes at it furiously.

Peter glances at him, his expression softening. “It’s all right, omega.”

Stiles feels hollow inside, empty. It manifests as an ache that centers in his abdomen and radiates throughout his entire body. Every cell in him is attuned to that emptiness.

As hard as Stiles tries, he can’t remember how his failure to conceive is supposed to make him feel good.

 

***

 

Days later, Stiles finds out that someone snapped a picture of him and Peter walking into Dr. Deaton’s office, and now, like they’re some celebrity couple or something, people are speculating all over the world if MTB is pregnant, and what that will mean for the omega movement. Stiles thinks that, not too far from now, there’ll be some Disneyfied version of his life turned into a movie, where he’s a strident, stubborn omega, full of pathetic, exaggerated bluster, but handsome prince Peter Hale will come along and sweep him off his feet, and calm him down the old-fashioned way: with a bid, followed by a baby. In that version of his life, Stiles thinks, they probably won’t show the beatings.

Peter isn’t amused by the attention either. Probably, Stiles thinks, because Peter’s sense of identity is so wrapped up in being an alpha that he feels like less of a man if his omega’s not immediately popping out babies. That failure is reflected in Stiles, magnified somehow, and Stiles feels it like a creeping sense of shame wrapping itself inexorably around him. He’s never felt so conflicted before in his life: he doesn’t want a baby, but his entire body’s crying out at the loss of not having one inside him.

They still fuck, but it’s empty somehow. It’s meaningless. Stiles won’t get pregnant outside his heat, so Peter’s attentions feel perfunctory. Stiles still craves him though, and closes his eyes and imagines that Peter’s whispering in his ear that he’s a good omega, a good mate, a good boy… anything except the straining silence broken only by grunts and gasps and the slap of skin against skin.

A day after Peter tells him about the pictures of their visit to Deaton’s, Stiles is surprised by the doorbell in the middle of the afternoon. He leaves the mop leaning against the bathroom door, and hurries down the stairs. It’s too early for Peter or Derek to be home, and he wonders if it’s his dad.

He opens the door to reveal a stranger.

“Hello, Stiles,” the woman says. She’s beautiful, but Stiles can’t help his gaze falling to her throat, which is marked with scars. “My name is Braeden Smith. I’d like to talk to you.”

For a second his mind goes blank. Firstly, he can’t remember the last time a stranger called him by his name. And secondly, yeah, a stranger. “Who are you?”

“I’m a journalist,” she begins, and Stiles tries to shut the door. She jams a boot inside. “I’m working on a piece about MTB, and I want your side of the story.”

“I can’t talk to you,” Stiles says, and waits for her to withdraw her boot.

She doesn’t. “It can be off the record, if you want.”

Stiles snorts. Yeah, because there are so many candidates for an unnamed source close to MTB that Peter will never be able to figure it out, right? “Go away, or I’ll call the police.”

An empty threat. The house hasn’t got a landline and Peter hasn’t given him a cell phone.

“Come on, kid, don’t you want to tell you side of the story?”

He does, more than anything, but he can’t. “Go away!”

She still don’t move her damned foot. “Not supposed to tell tales out of school, are you? I’ll bet Peter Hale is traditional through and through like that.”

“Seriously, go away!” Stiles shoves on the door, and she doesn’t even flinch.

“Or maybe everyone’s right,” Braden continues, “and you’re happy being a mated omega after all.”

“I can’t talk to you! Go away!”

“Stiles, I want to help you!”

“No, you don’t!” He keeps the pressure on the door. “Just leave me alone!”

For a second something like genuine pity flashes across her face, and then it’s gone, leaving a tight smile in its place. “Fine. I’m going, okay? I’m going.”

She pulls her boot out of the doorway, and Stiles slams the door shut in relief.

 

***

 

“Stiles Stilinski,” Peter reads aloud the next morning, “better known to the world as MTB, appeared tired and frightened when I attempted to speak with him.”

Stiles freezes. “Alpha?”

Peter sets his tablet down on the table. “Well, this isn’t ideal.”

“I didn’t say anything, Alpha,” Stiles says anxiously. “I didn’t let her in!”

He’d told Peter about the journalist, because he’s not an idiot. Because if he hadn’t, and Peter had found out anyway, it would have looked like he was keeping secrets.

Peter reads from his tablet again. “MTB is now mated to Peter Hale, alpha, and director of the DOR. It’s either a match made in heaven, or in hell, depending on your politics.”

“It’s not his fault, Peter,” Derek says in a firm voice.

“He opened the door to her.”

“And how was he supposed to know a journalist would track him down here?” Derek asks. “He didn’t tell her anything. Give him a break, Peter, Jesus.”

Peter raises his eyebrows. “I’m not going to punish him. Derek, although clearly he’ll know better in the future than to just open the door to anyone.”

Stiles nods obediently. "I will, Alpha! I do!" 

Peter cards his fingers through his hair. It’s longer now, longer than Stiles has worn it since he was a kid. Peter likes it that way. “I know how pushy journalists can be. I’m just wondering how to make the best of this unfortunate situation.”

Stiles sinks into grateful silence.

“Yes,” Peter says at last. “We’ll do an interview, but on our own terms. If the world is so anxious to see how MTB is doing, then we must show them.”

Stiles jerks his head up. “Alpha?”

Peter tugs his ear gently. “Don’t panic, omega. Surely MTB isn’t afraid of a little _exposure_?”

Stiles’s face burns as he thinks of how much Peter has already exposed him, during his heat. “Maybe, maybe if you tell me what to say, Alpha?”

Peter’s smile turns fond. “Of course I will, omega. Of course I will.”

 

***

 

Stiles wears a suit for the first time since his mom’s funeral. He sits with Peter on the couch in the living room, and smiles for the photographer Braeden has brought with her. It’s easy to listen to Peter talk. He talks so well, and with such charm and confidence that Stiles almost falls a little bit in love with this version of him. He talks about MTB, and omegas needing guidance, and doesn’t even stumble when Braeden asks who leaked the videos of Stiles in his heat.

“It’s not something that was done lightly, I can assure you,” he says smoothly. “But, unwittingly, my mate had amassed something of a following. These are impressionable kids, for the most part, and it’s important for them to see the reality of being an omega. Stiles is much happier now than he ever was before, isn’t that right, Stiles?”

“Yes,” Stiles lies through a smile, and then worries that it might not be a total lie.

He stares at the glinting lens of the camera and sees himself through it. Sees his smile and his lies, and wonders how many of MTB’s followers will hate him for this. Worse, how many will lose hope.

If there’s a time to make a stand…

It’s now.

It’s now, and Stiles lets it pass.

He’s too afraid of what Peter would do.

Peter laughs through her question about the visit to Dr. Deaton’s office as well. “That was just for a regular check up. As soon as we have happy news to share, we’ll certainly do so. Stiles was on a lot of those terrible suppressants for years. It sometimes takes a little while for nature to reassert itself.”

“And are you looking forward to having children, Stiles?” Braeden asks him.

He can tell that she knows, but he smiles anyway, and curls his fingers through Peter’s. “Very much so.”

“If your child is an omega, what advice will you give it?”

She _knows_. Stiles stomach clenches, and he hates her for asking a question like that. “I think, if we have an omega, that Peter will give it the best gui—” He struggles to get the word out. “Guidance.”

Braeden is silent for a long moment. Then she smiles slightly. “I think a lot of people might be very disappointed to hear you say that.”

Well a lot of people don’t have Peter Hale ready to beat the shit out of them for breaking the rules, do they?

“I’m sorry if I upset anyone,” Stiles says, his throat aching. “I never wanted to. I started the blog when I was thirteen, and I was confused. I’m not confused anymore.”

Peter’s grip tightens.

No, Stiles isn’t confused.

He’s trapped.

The interview winds up with Peter talking some more about omega education reform while Stiles listens attentively. When they’re done, Stiles shows Braeden and the photographer to the door.

“Thank you for your time, Stiles,” Braeden says while the photographer loads his gear into their car. She looks over Stiles’s shoulder quickly, and leans in a little closer. “You’re a very good liar.”

Stiles feels his eyes widen with shock. He clamps his mouth shut.

“You have a lovely home,” she says, this time in a tone made to carry.

“Thank you,” he croaks.

She lowers her voice again. “If your circumstances ever change, call me. I can get you any prime time interview you want. Times are changing, Stiles, for all of us.”

Us?

And then she’s gone, striding toward the car.

_Us?_

No fucking way is Braeden Smith an omega. No fucking way. She’s at least easily a beta, and possibly even an alpha. No fucking way.

“Omega?” Peter calls from inside the house.

Stiles locks the door behind Braeden, and hurries back to his alpha.


	10. Chapter 10

Stiles doesn’t see the story that Braeden writes, but Peter walks around with a satisfied smile for a few days after the interview, so he supposes it said exactly what Peter wanted it to say. Stiles is torn between sickening pride for pleasing his alpha, and self-disgust for all the people he’s betrayed. All the people who supported him, even before they knew who he was. The people who supported him even after they saw him in heat. He likes to imagine that one day he’ll be free to tell the truth, even if it’s only from behind a keyboard again. Another part of him, a part that’s growing stronger all the time, just wants him to be _good_.

After his third heat, Stiles comes out of the heat room feeling sore and sick. He spends the next two days in bed, before Peter drives him to Dr. Deaton’s office again.

“I’m sorry,” Deaton says with a small sympathetic smile when the blood results come back.

Peter’s mood darkens considerably. The tiniest infractions earn Stiles swats with the ruler. At the same time, each night Peter sleeps with a hand splayed over Stiles’s abdomen, and Stiles squeezes his eyes shut and wishes he could get pregnant. He thinks Peter would be nicer, if only Stiles’s body could do what it was supposed to do. If only he wasn’t proving to be defective in absolutely every way.

He starts thinking about running again. He slips a few more tins into the pack in Laura’s closet. He’s not sure he can live like this for much longer, constantly balanced on a knife’s edge, and Derek can’t tell him when things will change. _If_ things will change.

Peter and Derek are fighting a lot more. Derek does most of the shouting, while Peter usually just smiles and curls his fingers possessively around the back of Stiles’s neck. That shuts Derek up, every single time.

Stiles spends his days doing the housework, stopping sometimes to stare outside into the Preserve. The leaves are turning, and it’s beautiful. Red and gold and bittersweet.

It’s a shock when he realizes he’s been Peter’s mate for five months now.

Five months that he can count in the bruises on his skin, in the dark circles under his eyes, and in the emptiness inside him.

His fifth heat is less intense than his fourth, and Stiles hopes that means they’re finally stabilizing. Because he can’t keep doing this every few weeks. His body needs longer to recover, and it doesn’t help that now he’s desperate and frightened when Peter’s fucking him. He begs for his alpha to breed him, to impregnate him, and at the same time he wails and cries because he’s afraid he’s defective.

The look on Peter’s face when he’s fucking him is terrifying.

An omega serves a single purpose: to breed. If Stiles can’t do that, then what is he? He knows his identity used to be more than this, he knows he’s _Stiles_ —his dad’s son, and Scott’s friend, and he was Derek’s boyfriend, and he’s smart and kind of funny and totally clumsy—but the only thing that registers is his abject failure, and Peter’s anger.

One night after his heat he joins Derek on the couch in the middle of the night and they watch a movie together. He doesn’t speak, but Derek holds his hand under the cover of a blanket. Stiles can’t decide if it’s comfort, or if it’s torture.

It’s probably torture.

“It wouldn’t have been like this,” Derek says at last, his voice quiet. “Not for us.”

Peter is upstairs, asleep, but Stiles is still afraid to turn his head and look at Derek. Just the soft sweep of his fingertips across Stiles’s palm is too dangerous.

On the TV screen, a boy is holding a baby, and Stiles’s eye sting.

“I would have worshipped you.” Derek’s voice cracks. “I do. I _do_ worship you.”

He shouldn’t.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say it.” Derek swallows audibly. “It just makes things worse, and—”

“Things can’t be any worse,” Stiles says. He turns his hand so that he can rub the inside of Derek’s wrist with his thumb, and feel their pulses fluttering together. “Please tell me. Please tell me how it would have been.”

He’ll take the torture, if it will give him something beautiful to hold onto as well.

“We would have got our own place,” Derek says. “An apartment in town. Somewhere with a spare room for all your dumb comic books and computer games. I would have bought you boxers with Batman on them, and novelty socks, and we would have eaten mac and cheese every night and listened to your terrible taste in music.”

“I have _great_ taste in music,” Stiles whispers, his smile threatening to break him.

“Terrible,” Derek tells him. His shaking fingers slide over Stiles’s palm again. “But you would have talked my ear off until I agreed with you.”

Stiles sucks in a shaking breath. “Do you still love me, Der?”

“Yes.” Derek threads his fingers through Stiles’s. “Yes.”

“I love you too.” Stiles blinks, and tears slip down his cheeks. “I’m scared I won’t remember that.”

“I’m sorry,” Derek says. He turns his head toward Stiles at last. “I’m afraid that just being here makes it worse for you, but I’m more afraid to leave you alone with him.”

“Things can’t be any worse,” Stiles says again. “I don’t like you seeing what happens to me, with Peter, or with the heat, or how I’m changing, how I’m _sinking_ , but I’m selfish too, Der. I don’t want you to leave me. I should. If I was a better person, I’d tell you to go, find someone else, be happy, but I’m not. I’m selfish.”

“You’re not selfish.”

“Selfish and scared,” Stiles says. He wishes he had the courage to lean toward Derek and kiss him, just like they used to before he was mated to Peter. Although all their kisses back then had been chaste. Stiles wants more from Derek now. He wants to kiss him properly. He wants…he wants Derek to hold him down and fuck him until the memory of Peter has been obliterated from every cell in his body. He doesn’t move. “I’m scared.”

“Me too,” Derek says.

Once, Stiles had thought he had a love story. He’d imagined telling it to the world one day, how he and Derek had met in the library and made plans for their future in secret. How Derek had bid on him, and how it had been the best day of his life. How he’d found a mate who loved him and respected him and only laughed when he broke the rules. A perfect mate.

And now he has this.

Stolen moments in the middle of the night when all they can do is lay their heartbreak out over and over again.

It’s torture, but out of all the ways Stiles has been tortured since he became Peter’s omega, this is only one that makes him feel like a human being.

  

***

 

Stiles sits quietly in the car beside Peter, already dreading his appointment with Dr. Deaton. If it’s a negative result again, Peter will be unhappy. And how long until that unhappiness becomes a more focused weapon, directed right at Stiles? Peter’s patience isn’t infinite, not by a long shot. But if it’s positive… God, if it’s positive, Stiles’s life is over.

He opens his mouth as Peter drives past a prime parking spot right out the front of Deaton’s office, and fiddles with his seatbelt instead. Maybe Peter needs to make another stop first, or maybe he just wants to park around the block or something. Stiles knows better than to ask.

A few minutes later, they pull up at the hospital.

“Alpha?” Stiles asks in a small voice. The day is cool, and he fumbles with the zipper on his hoodie as he follows Peter toward the entrance.

Peter stops and waits for him, arching his brows.

“Why are we here instead of Dr. Deaton’s, Alpha?” Stiles asks.

Peter shows him a cold smile. “I’m not a fool, omega.”

Stiles blinks. He has no idea where this is coming from. “I don’t understand, Alpha.”

Peter grips him tightly by the elbow and pulls him toward the entrance. “I’m am very, very tired of you playing dumb.”

 _Not playing_ , Stiles wants to tell him. _Actually dumb_.

He lets Peter drag him inside.

Stiles has spent a lot of hours at the hospital. First, when his mom was here. And then because Scott’s mom works here. The place has been the home of some of his worst memories, and some of his best. His mom dying. Wheelchair races with Scott. His mom. Melissa. His mom.

They pass the nurses’ station where Melissa works, and Stiles twists his head. He gets a glimpse of her, in her pastel pink scrubs, a clipboard in her hand, and she looks up but Stiles doesn’t think he sees her. Peter’s already pulling him into an elevator.

They get out on the second floor. There’s a woman waiting for them.

“Alpha Hale,” she says and extends her hand.

“Doctor,” Peter says, nodding.

“Follow me,” she says, her gaze narrowing as she looks at Stiles.

She leads them into an examination room. She doesn’t make Stiles undress, only has him sit on the table while she takes his blood.

“I’ll run the results myself,” she says.

Peter leans against the wall, his arms folded over his chest, and watches Stiles. Stiles sits hunched over, his heart racing. He doesn’t know what’s going on, and why Peter is staring at him like he’s done something wrong.

The clock on the wall slowly ticks away.

It takes twenty-three minutes for the doctor to return. Her face is grave, and Stiles knows immediately that it’ll be another negative result. His heart sinks.

“Negative for pregnancy,” the doctor says. She shows Peter a form. “And positive for elevated levels of estrogen and progesterone consistent with the use of contraceptives.”

Peter’s head snaps up and he stares at Stiles. His face is murderous.

“No!” Stiles manages. He shakes his head. “That’s impossible! Alpha, please, it’s impossible!”

It’s a nightmare. He’s trapped in a nightmare. Peter’s hand is suddenly around his throat, and he can’t breathe, and then he’s on the floor, and he’s crying and begging, and the test must be _wrong_ , because it’s impossible.

“Please, Alpha! Please, Alpha! Please!” he begs, curling up to shield himself from Peter’s kicks. “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t take anything! Please!”

Peter crouches down and grips a handful of his hair. “You deceitful little _whore_.”

Peter slams his head against the floor, and Stiles’s vision goes white.

Later, he thinks he must be the only person in the world who leaves a hospital more injured than when he arrived. 

 

*** 

Stiles screams and tries to crawl under Peter’s desk. Peter hauls him out easily, and smacks the ruler right across the bridge of his nose. Stiles howls, and blood sprays out of his mouth. He babbles, incoherent, begging Peter not to hurt him anymore, crying for his dad, for Derek, for _anyone_.

Peter shoves two fingers into his mouth, and Stiles gags. He swallows reflexively, and tastes blood. The pills are down before he even knows they were in his mouth. Then Peter shoves another one between his split lips. Stiles whimpers and shakes his head, but Peter clamps a hand over his mouth and pinches his nose until he swallows again.

No. He’s hurt, and he’s too weak, and he can’t have another heat now.

Peter drags him down the basement stairs by his hair, and flings him onto the mattress. Stiles tries to roll away from him as Peter leans down and strips his blood-stained clothes off him, leaving him in nothing but the collar.

Stiles tries to take the least line of resistance. He tries to get up onto his knees, into position, but he can’t. He blinks his eyes closed and feels himself slipping away.

When he wakes up again, his left eye won’t open.

He tries to raise his hands, and can’t. He tries again, and hears the rattle of chains, feels the tug of metal around his wrists.

He moans into the mattress, blood spreading in a wet stain under his busted mouth.

He tries to move his legs, but they’re chained too.

_No._

No, he needs to get upstairs. He needs to get to Laura’s pack, and he needs to leave now, because Peter is going to kill him. Just like he killed Laura.

He wrenches against the chains as the heat descends.

He dreams he runs.

He’s in the Preserve, and there’s a dark-haired girl walking beside him. She’s so beautiful. She looks a little like Derek. She dangles a key ring between her fingers. I ♥ Alfalfa.  

“Am _I_ alfalfa?” he asks her, because he wants her to love him.

She laughs at him fondly.

Then Derek’s standing beside them. “You fucked up Peter’s files,” he tells the girl.

The girl laughs at him too.

“Derek,” Stiles says. “Are you running away with me?”

But Derek’s already gone. When he looks for Laura again, she’s gone too and he’s lost in the trees.

The chains rattle when he moves.

His heat burns through him like fire, and he thinks of the old Hale house, and the family that died when it burned to ashes. There’s acid in his veins, and he wants to tear his skin off, and it hurts, it hurt, it _hurts._  

“Lying little bitch of an omega,” Peter growls in his ear when he fucks him. “Thought you were smarter than me? You don’t deserve to get bred, you dirty little whore.”

Stiles wails and begs for it.

“I’ll keep you here in chains, watch you get fat with the babies you’ll never even see. You’ll never even get to hold them. They won’t even know you exist.”

Stiles sobs into the mattress and wishes he was dead.

 

***

  

“Jesus. _Stiles_?”

Stiles knows that voice. He’s pretty sure he hates that voice. He opens his right eye and twists his head. It’s a guy in a suit.

“Get some water. Get me some fucking water now!” The suit crouches down beside him. “Stiles?”

Holy shit. It’s Rafael McCall, Scott’s dad. Yeah, Stiles totally hates him, except he’s chained naked on a mattress and he’s pretty sure Peter’s going to kill him, and Mr. McCall once put a Band-Aid on his skinned knee when he was five, and Stiles is too tired to actually hate anyone right now.

“Your warrant extends to my heat room, really?” Peter drawls from the doorway in a bored tone.

“The kid needs medical attention,” Mr. McCall says.

No. _Agent_ McCall. Scott’s dad is in the FBI.

“My omega’s welfare is my concern, not yours,” Peter tells him. “Shouldn’t you be searching the rest of the house? Not that you’ll find anything, of course. This is nothing but a witch hunt.”

A monster hunt, Stiles thinks. He wants to tell Scott’s dad that the monster’s right behind them, but the words don’t come out like words at all. They come out like a wheeze.

“Just ridiculous allegations from my political opponents,” Peter says. “Fuelled by rumors started by omega rights troublemakers. My lawyers will sue your director and you personally, Agent McCall, into the ground.”

“Where’s that water?” Agent McCall says tightly, ignoring him.

There’s movement behind them and then another agent is standing behind Scott’s dad, handing down a bottle of water.

“Alpha Hale, Agent Fielding is going to start the search upstairs. I expect you’ll want to join her.”

“You know you can’t question my omega without myself or my lawyer present,” Peter tells him.

“Your omega,” Agent McCall says through gritted teeth, “is barely fucking conscious.”

Peter makes a satisfied sound and walks away with Agent Fielding.

Stiles whimpers as Agent McCall dabs water on his face, then tilts his head up so he can take a sip.

“My dad,” Stiles whispers.

“You want me to get a message to him?” Agent McCall leans closer.

“My dad has Laura’s computer.” Stiles smiles despite himself.

Because maybe she didn’t just fuck up all Peter’s files. Maybe she copied them first.

 

***

 

The FBI is gone.

They didn’t find anything.

Wait, except that one thing: Laura’s pack in her closet, full of clothes and tins of food. The FBI doesn’t care about a pack of clothes and food in a dead girl’s bedroom, but Peter watched them find it. Watched, and understood that Stiles had been planning to run for a long time.

Stiles doesn’t scream for help when Peter beats him for that, on top of everything else. There’s nobody left in the house who can help him.

Derek is gone too.

Peter threw him out of the house, he tells Stiles, because he was turning Stiles against him.

Peter rehires his cleaning lady, because Stiles will be kept chained in the heat room from now on. Peter allows him out twice a day. Once to make breakfast, and once to make dinner. He’s allowed to shower in the morning, under Peter’s supervision. For the first week he can hardly climb the stairs out of the basement, let alone to the bathroom.

“I don’t know how you convinced Deaton to give you contraceptives instead of vitamins,” Peter tells him, “but I have my suspicions. Did you offer him your pretty little mouth?”

Stiles has long ago stopped bothering deny anything.

He’s long ago stopped bothering about anything.

Peter can’t hurt him, not any worse than he already has.

He’s lost Derek, and his dad, and everything.

He thinks back to when he told Deaton he was going to die in this house. It’s worse, now. He’s going to die in the heat room. In a week, in a year, or in a decade or more. It doesn’t make any difference now.

The doctor from the hospital pays them a house call. She doesn’t treat Stiles’s injuries. She only draws blood, and then leaves again.

Stiles curls up on his mattress as much as the chains will allow him, and stares at the wall.

The people he talked to on More Than Biology always said that the worst thing would be having all their choices taken away from them, and being treated like nothing. Stiles had imagined it, or thought he had, but he hasn’t really felt it until now. Even Peter’s rage has faded since his heat, as though Stiles isn’t even worth hating.

He’s _less_ than nothing.

Peter doesn’t even bother talk to him anymore. Just releases him from his chains twice a day, and put them back on him again. He only really touches him to fuck him.

That evening, Stiles whimpers as Peter unfastens the cuff on his right wrist. It’s cut into his skin, and his wrist is bleeding again. Peter ignores his small pained noise and unfastens the other cuffs. Then he sets up off the stairs, knowing Stiles will follow.

Everything hurts as he sets one foot after the other up the stairs. He braces himself against the wall.

He rests for a moment in the hallway before he tackles the next set of steps to the bathroom, because he needs to piss. When he finally comes downstairs again, he can hear Peter talking on his cell phone in his study.

Stiles moves slowly into the kitchen and begins to assemble what he needs for Peter’s dinner. His hands shake as he chops the vegetables.

He’s so consumed with his pain and his misery that he doesn’t even realize Peter is behind him until the man’s arms slide around him and he rests his chin on his shoulder. Stiles tries not to cry out in pain.

Peter splays a hand over his abdomen.

“That was the doctor,” he says, and Stiles almost jerks in shock. It’s been days since Peter said a word to him. Peter rubs his bruised flesh. “I guess you finally did something right, omega.”

Sour bile rises in Stiles’s throat and he fights the urge to vomit.

“Congratulate me,” Peter smirks, his voice low with amusement. “I’m going to be a daddy.”

 

***

 

Stiles can’t breathe.

There’s a baby inside him and knife in his hand, and he can’t breathe, and he can’t believe he didn’t think of this before.

Peter nuzzles his face against the back of his neck. “You can be my good boy again, can’t you, omega?”

“Yes, Alpha,” Stiles whispers. He wants to believe that he can, he wants to believe that Peter won’t have a reason to hurt him again, but he knows Peter will find one. He remembers what Peter said when he was in heat: _“I’ll keep you here in chains, watch you get fat with the babies you’ll never even see. You’ll never even get to hold them. They won’t even know you exist.”_

He closes his eyes and imagines what it would feel like to jam the knife he’s holding into Peter’s guts. Except he can’t do that. He _can’t_ , because of his fucking biology. Everything in him is hardwired to submit, to obey, to be good. The thought of actually trying to hurt his alpha is physically sickening to him.

He can’t hurt Peter.

But he can hurt himself.

He waits until Peter moves into the dining room, then stares at the blade of the knife.

He’s terrified. He’s never been more terrified of anything in his life, but that’s just it, isn’t it? His _life_. He can’t keep going like this. He’s left it too late to run—he’s too weak, too hurt, and now he’s pregnant Peter will never stop looking for him—so this is the only way.

This is the only way.

It’s surprising, how much it hurts when he opens the vein in his left arm.

It’s surprising how much blood there is.

Stiles bites his lip to keep from crying out, because he needs this to work without Peter hearing him. He sinks to the kitchen floor and leans back against the cabinets. The handle of the knife is already slippery with blood when he transfers it to his left hand. He can hardly hold it, but he does his best to cut his right arm open as well.

Then he rests his hands on his abdomen, and whispers an apology to his dad, to Derek, to Scott, and to the tiny little life growing inside him.

“M’sorry,” he murmurs. “I probably would have loved you, even if you’re his.”

He sits and waits for it to be over, and all he feels is an overwhelming sense of relief.

Then, unexpectedly, he hears a fist hammering on the front door, and an all-too-familiar voice call out: “Sheriff’s Department. Open the door!”


	11. Chapter 11

Stiles has had nightmares about this since he was a kid. His dad’s uniform is covered in blood. Covered in it.

“Dad?” Stiles tries to reach for him, but he can’t. He’s had nightmares about that too. “Dad, are you okay?”

His dad is gripping his wrists tightly, blood pumping between his fingers. “What’d you do, kid? What’d you do?”

Oh. It’s not his dad’s blood. Oh, thank God. He’s okay. His dad’s okay.

The whole world is spinning and fading in and out of focus, but his dad’s okay.

There are people everywhere. People in deputies’ uniforms and suits, and they’re tracking blood all over the kitchen. There’s a lot of blood. Peter’s here as well, his face pale with shock as he stares over Deputy Parrish’s shoulder at Stiles.

And Stiles tries to laugh, because Peter’s not winning, not this time. Everything’s crashing down around his ears right about now. Agent McCall is putting him in handcuffs, and Stiles hopes they’re tight, but mostly it’s funny because everything Peter ever wanted is bleeding out on his kitchen floor.

MTB gets the last word after all.

“Where’s that ambulance?” his dad yells. “Where that fucking ambulance?”

 _I won,_ Stiles wants to tell him. _Don’t cry, Dad, I won._

But he’s already slipping away.

 

***

 

There are reporters camped out in the street outside the hospital, Melissa tells him. 

That’s just crazy.

Everything is just crazy.

His heart stopped on Peter Hale’s kitchen floor, and his dad broke three of his ribs getting it beating again.

Everything hurts.

“Dad?” he asks on his third day in the hospital, but the first he’s been awake for more than a few minutes at a time.

“I’m here, kiddo.” His dad places a trembling hand over his own.

“Do I have to go back to Peter?”

“Stiles, I will kill him before you have to go back to him.”

Which isn’t exactly an answer, is it? If Stiles wasn’t so tired, he’d point that out. Instead he just nods and frets briefly that he can’t feel his fingers, and then slips back into sleep.

When he wakes up again, Scott’s asleep in the chair beside the bed, and his dad and Derek and Melissa are having a not-as-quiet-as-they-think argument over by the door. Stiles doesn’t know what it’s about until Melissa says the word ‘termination’. Stiles puts his numb hands over his abdomen and the small movement captures their attention.

“It’s still there?” he asks in a quiet voice. Maybe he thought that when his heart stopped, the baby’s would as well. Maybe he thought it was like a giant reset button, and the baby would have magically vanished.

“We can take care of it, honey,” Melissa says. “It’s illegal, but there’s a doctor on staff who’ll do it for you, if that’s what you want.”

Scott snuffles awake.

“Of course it’s what he wants,” Derek says, but then his angry scowl falters as he meets Stiles’s gaze. “Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles says. The machine beside his bed beeps faster as his heartbeat ratchets up. He was supposed to die, that was the neat solution. He made his choice in Peter’s kitchen. He doesn’t want to think about the baby now. He doesn’t want to think about it ever. He wants it to just go away, but it hasn’t, and he’s not ready to make a decision yet. He’d told it in the kitchen that he probably would have loved it even if it was Peter’s, but that was easy to say when he thought he was killing them both. Now it’s real, and he’s not ready to deal with it.

“Stiles,” his dad says in a gentle voice. “If we do it now, we can alter the records and say you lost it because of the trauma. We have a small window of opportunity here, son.”

“I don’t know,” Stiles says again.

“You need to make a decision, very soon,” Melissa says.

“Melissa’s right, kiddo.”

Stiles starts to tremble.

“Everyone just back the fuck off!” Scott reaches out and grabs Stiles's hand, and glares at everyone else. “Stiles can take as long as he needs to decide!”

Stiles jerks in surprise at Scott’s sudden alpha tone. Melissa and Derek both take a step back. Even Stiles’s dad does.

Scott looks as startled as everyone else, and a little shamefaced. “Sorry.”

“Dude, that was awesome,” Stiles whispers.

Scott flushes. “I’ve got your back, bro.”

Stiles raises a weak hand for a fist bump. Then his ribs start hurting again, and his arm does, and he drops his hand back down. “Gonna be a while before I can play Mario Karts.”

He wonders how much he’s injured his wrists and his hands and if he’ll ever be able to play video games again. What if he fucked up his tendons or nerves or something and never gets full feeling back in his fingers? And then he wonders if he’s totally jumping the gun on that anyway. He’s alive, but he might not be free.

“Dad,” he says. “Tell me what’s happening with Peter.”

His dad sits down on the edge of his bed. “The FBI arrested him for the embezzlement,” he says. “He’s in their custody right now.”

Stiles swallows and nods. “Okay. Right now. What about later?”

“We cross our fingers he doesn’t get bail,” his dad tells him. His hand is warm against Stiles’s. “Hey, kid, I told you, I’m not letting him get near you again.”

“Okay,” Stiles whispers, but he wonders if there will ever be a time in his life again when he trusts a promise as big as that one can remain unbroken. “Okay.”

“Okay,” his dad repeats softly.

Stiles spreads his fingers out over his abdomen, the blankets scratchy under his touch. “Dad? How come I was on contraceptives and I didn’t even know it?”

His dad’s face falls. “Stiles…”

Stiles’s stomach drops like he’s just plummeted over the edge of a cliff. He pulls his hand away from his dad and looks to Derek.

Derek draws a deep breath. “We decided, with Deaton’s agreement, that you couldn’t know. An omega in heat… if you’d known, you might have admitted it to him.”

Stiles feels cold, and then hot, and then he feels every fucking blow that Peter delivered still echoing like shockwaves in his bones. “You didn’t think I could decide for myself?”

His dad shakes his head. “We thought it was for the best.”

“You know what I think? I think it’s another choice that was taken off me, and this time by people I trusted!” Hot, angry tears spill from his eyes. “I trusted you!”

Rationally, he knows that they’re right. He knows that in the middle of heat, when he was begging Peter to breed him, that he would never have been able to keep a secret like that. It would have been too much of a betrayal of his mating bond with his alpha. The guilt would have broken him.

“Do you even know how angry he was?” Stiles shivers. Of course they know. They’ve seen the marks of Peter’s rage all over his body. And Scott’s dad saw him beaten half to death, in chains, so they probably heard every detail of that too. But they’ll never know the devastation he felt when Peter threatened to keep him there forever, to make him a stranger to any babies he had.

His breath catches in his throat, because he’s not free yet and he can’t afford to think he is. That nightmare could still be in his future. The life growing inside him… even if he keeps it he might never get to hold it, and it might never even know his name.

“You had no right to do that,” Stiles tells them now, scrubbing at his face. “I thought he was going to kill me, and I never even knew how I’d done what he was accusing me of! You decided, but I’m the one who paid for it!”

“Stiles,” his dad says helplessly. “Oh God, Stiles.”

“All this time I said I was more than my biology, and you didn’t believe it! You didn’t believe it any more than him!” 

Derek looks as shocked as though Stiles had slapped him.

“I don’t even want to talk to you now,” Stiles tells him, his heart breaking. “Leave me alone, both of you. Just leave me alone.”

If they don’t walk away, if they don’t let him decide _this_ , he’ll never be able to look at either of them again.

The door closes behind them.

Stiles turns toward Scott. “Tell me you didn’t know.”

Scott’s puppy-dog eyes are filled with tears. “Stiles, I swear I didn’t know.”

“Good,” Stiles says, his breath shuddering out of him. “Good, because I really don’t want to have to kick you out of here too.”

Scott climbs onto the bed beside him. “I’d like to see you try.”

Stiles muffles a hysterical laugh into Scott’s throat, and holds him as tightly and for as long as his injuries allow. He falls asleep with Scott’s arms around him.

 

***

 

The next few days are awkward. Both his dad and Derek apologize. There are tears on all sides.

“I know,” Stiles tells them. “I know you only did it for my own good, I _know_.”

He’s afraid he can’t really articulate how much it feels like a betrayal—not just of him, but of every omega who’s ever have a choice taken from them—but maybe they get it after all. He hopes they do, because otherwise how will he ever trust them again?

Because his dad refuses to leave his room for more than a few minutes at a time, Stiles learns more about the investigation into Peter Hale that he guesses he really should. Agent McCall is keeping Stiles’s dad in the loop. Stiles thinks it’s less about Agent McCall showing professional courtesy to the Sheriff of Beacon Hills, and more about the fact that he saw his son’s best friend chained and bloodied in Peter Hale’s basement. Stiles thinks of those few sips of water Agent McCall gave him, and the look on his face while he did it. He wonders if he was thinking of Scott at the time.

Scott and his dad haven’t really talked in years, but they’re kind of stuck doing it now, because the hospital room is too small for them to keep avoiding one another. Sometimes Agent McCall gets a hunted look around him when both Scott and Melissa are there, like he suspects he’s walked right into a trap and he’s waiting for it to snap shut. Stiles wants to tell him he’s an asshole, that Melissa and Scott were the best thing that ever happened to him, but sometimes he sees the way that Agent McCall glances at them, and he thinks that maybe he knows.

He wonders if life is nothing but an expanding catalog of regrets.

He scrapes his spoon around the container of his hospital pudding. Melissa makes sure he only gets chocolate, because the vanilla has a weird aftertaste. Derek sits beside him on the other side of the bed from Scott, and Stiles doesn’t know how to think about him yet. It still feels wrong to touch, like it’s a betrayal of his mate. Like infidelity.

Nobody has told him what to do with a mating bond to a monster.

He listens to his dad and Agent McCall discuss the FBI’s cases against Peter, and flushes a little when Agent McCall nods at him. “The files had been deleted off Laura’s laptop,” Agent McCall tells him. “The drive was corrupted, so it took a while for the techs at the lab to retrieve the data.”

Stiles’s dad grunts at that. “Yeah? Well, my guys had it for weeks and couldn’t pull anything useful!”

“We were looking for very different things, John,” Agent McCall says in a quiet voice. “Even with the files, it took a forensic accountant to put the pieces together for us and actually make a case for embezzlement.”

Stiles knows how inter-departmental investigations work, or rather, don’t. There’s always a lot of talk about fostering a spirit of co-operation, but it never quite works that way in practice. There’s a culture of mistrust between departments, even when they’re supposed to be on the same side. There’s always a lot of shouting about jurisdictional boundaries, and a whole lot of dick measuring. Stiles figures that Agent McCall was told not to involve the local Sheriff’s Department, particularly since the sheriff’s son was mated to the main suspect. And his dad probably didn’t even know the FBI were in town to execute the warrant until the last minute. 

“It’s okay. This whole thing has been a total clusterfuck of bad timing, right?” He lifts his arms and shows his bandaged wrists.

His dad’s eyes shine with tears, and he turns his face away quickly. He clears his throat before he turns back and says to Agent McCall, gruffly, “So what can you prove?”

“About five million all up,” Agent McCall nods. “It’s probably not a fraction of what he’s done, but it’s enough to put him away for…” His gaze cuts to Stiles again, and darkens. “For a few years.”

Stiles sinks back against his pillows, his mouth tightening.

“Kid,” his dad says, “you are _not_ going back to him.”

“You really think Peter’s going to let me walk away?” He shakes his head. “Dad, you were the one who told me not to run. And Derek. Derek, you said that only two percent of runaway omegas are never found.”

Derek, lurking by the window, doesn’t answer.

“And those are bad freaking odds,” Stiles says. “Even, even if he’s away for a few years, does that give us enough time to make me disappear? Because the whole fucking planet knows what my face looks like, don’t they?”

“We’re not having this conversation,” Agent McCall says suddenly.

Scott glares at him.

Agent McCall sighs, and shows Scott his palms. “If anyone asks, I mean, this conversation never happened.”

Silence settles over the room for a long while.

“Kill him,” Derek says suddenly.

Stiles’s jaw drops.

“Oh, fuck me,” Agent McCall mutters. He jabs a finger in Derek’s direction. “And we are definitely not having _this_ conversation!”

“He killed my sister,” Derek says, “and he raped and tortured the boy I love. If the only way to protect Stiles is to kill him, I’ll do it.”

Derek looks oddly calm, and Stiles wonders if that’s the same as he looked when he was holding the knife in his hands, having made his decision to die. He remembers the simplicity of that moment, the clarity. It was beautiful.

It’s crazy, because nobody is telling Derek not to do it.

“Der,” he says in a small voice. “Der?”

Derek turns his gaze on him.

“No,” he manages. “I don’t want you to go to prison. I don’t want you to lose you after everything.” He looks at his dad, and at Scott’s dad. “You’re the cops! Prove he killed Laura! Send him away forever!”

His dad passed a hand over his tired eyes. “We’re trying, Stiles. We’re trying, okay, but it’s not that easy.”

“He’s got a motive,” Agent McCall says. “But just because he wasn’t at home that night doesn’t prove he was at Berkeley.”

“He was,” Derek growls. “He must have been! Because if Laura found evidence he was corrupt, then that’s exactly the sort of thing he’d kill for. There is nothing more important to Peter than status, then power. I told myself I never saw it until he bid on Stiles, but I was just kidding myself. It was always there.”

“We’re looking,” Agent McCall says. “I promise, we’re looking.”

Stiles is kind of sick of promises.

Agent McCall is the first one to leave, followed shortly afterward by Stiles’s dad. Melissa checks the dressings on Stiles’s forearms, and threatens him with a sponge bath if he doesn’t stop fidgeting while she does it.

“Mom!” Scott exclaims.

Melissa tousles Stiles’s hair, then does the same with Scott. “I’ll make sure you get an extra pudding cup,” she says as she leaves.

“You wanna watch TV?” Derek asks.

Stiles is tired of TV. Particularly since his dad won’t let him watch the news, so he’s stuck on awful daytime movies and soap operas. Stiles has enough fucking drama in his life already, thanks.

He makes a face.

Derek picks up his messenger bag. He sets it down on the edge of Stiles bed and opens it. “So how about this instead?”

He pulls out Stiles’s laptop. It’s his laptop from home. He hasn’t seen it in months. It represents everything from his old life. _Everything._ His identity, his _freedom_.

“I don’t know if you want to post anything, or even look at the site, but…” Derek shrugs. “Fuck it. You can at least play Solitaire, right?”

Derek wheels the table over, and positions it over Stiles’s stomach. He opens the laptop up for him, and hits the power button.

Something almost breaks inside Stiles as the screen lights up.

He lifts his hands to the keyboard. Aching arms, sharp pain in his wrists and forearms, and numb, clumsy fingers. “I can’t… I can’t type.”

Derek and Scott exchange a glance.

“Dude,” Scott says. “Tell us what you want to type, and we’ll take turns.”

 

***

 

Writing shit down is supposed to be cathartic, right? Stiles doesn’t feel it yet. It takes all night to put down everything that happened, with Scott and Derek sliding the laptop back and forth. Stiles finds himself recounting everything in a matter-of-fact tone, keeping his distance from the words, from the memories. It’s easier to pretend he was a witness, not a victim. He doesn’t feel better when it’s done. He just feels tired.

He doesn’t post any of it online.

He doesn’t even check More Than Biology.

He feels bad though. “I mean, I don’t even want to interact at the moment, you know? I don’t want to give Peter anything he can use against me, but also, if I suddenly reappear people will ask stuff, you know? They’ll ask things and want me to answer, and I can’t deal with all that right now. But I want to tell them I’m still here.”

“They know,” Scott says. He brings up a webpage Stiles has never seen before and angles the screen so Stiles can see if more easily. Then he wrinkles his nose. “It’s not as good as yours or anything. Danny had to help me make it.”

It’s called True Alpha. Stiles raises his eyebrows at the header, and Scott flushes.

“Allison came up with the name. She said just because I’m an alpha I don’t have to be an asshole, and true alphas shouldn’t be.”

Stiles looks at the site again. It’s… _good_. It’s basically a bunch of stories from when Stiles and Scott were kids, and a lot of photos of them doing stupid stuff.

“Derek helped too,” Scott tells him.

Stiles looks at Derek, and he’s got an expression on his face like he’s waiting for Stiles to tear strips off him, like this is the contraceptives thing all over again.

“And we ran every post by your dad to make sure there was nothing in there that would get us, or you, in trouble.”

“So nothing here about the great escape?” Stiles asks with a slight grin.

“No, dude.” Scott looks abashed. “I wrote a whole thing about that, but everyone said it’d be dumb to post.”

Stiles sighs in relief, and then gets distracted by a post where Scott talks about the time they found a bunch of kittens abandoned at the back of the hospital, and Scott didn’t know what to do, but of course Stiles did. Right up until one of the nurses had found them stealing baby formula and bottles from the nursery. It wasn’t the first time they’d ridden in a police car, Scott told the world, but it was definitely the first time they were put in the holding cell at the station to teach them a lesson. They were seven.

Stiles smiles at the memory, and then checks Scott’s most recent post.

 _Today I got to see my best friend again for the first time in months. He’s in hospital, and I can’t really say anything else about that, except that Alpha Hale hasn’t done anything to him that is illegal_.

“Dude,” Stiles says. “Look at you! You totally had a Mark Antony moment here. They are all honorable men.”

Scott grins, and ducks his head. “Allison helped me write it like that.”

“You’ve turned into a spin doctor. All of this, it makes me real, you know? A real person, not just an omega.”

“I guess?” Scott shrugs, and then wrinkles his nose. “You _are_ a real person, you know? I just wanted people to know who you are, apart from MTB. I even had this journalist ask me if I was an alpha coming out in support of omega rights, and I was all like, 'Stiles is my friend. That’s what the site is about. If it makes people think more about omega rights, that’s just a weird coincidence.'”

Stiles almost laughs. “You’re totally devious now.”

Scott snorts. “We’ve been friends since we were four. I was bound to pick up a few tricks, right?”

“Best friends,” Stiles says in a quiet voice.

“ _Best_ friends,” Scott agrees fiercely. “Forever, bro.”

Stiles turns his face toward Derek. "And you helped him with the posts?" 

"I helped," Derek says quietly. He reaches out and brushes his fingers against Stiles's cheek. 

It’s been a long time that Stiles has been treading water, but he thinks he finally just got a glimpse of the shore.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go after this! Thanks for hanging in there!

 

His dad wakes him in the middle of the night. “Stiles? Come on, we’ve got to move you.”

Stiles blinks awake and looks around blearily. Scott’s pushing a wheelchair up to the bed, and Derek’s lurking by the door.

“What’s going on?”

“Peter got bail,” his dad says.

Stiles squints at the clock on the wall. “It’s almost midnight!”

“Emergency court session,” his dad says. “Asshole’s got a few judges in his pocket.”

“Where are we going?” Stiles asks and his dad helps him into the chair. He wants to protest that he can walk, but fuck it. He’s already too shaky.

“We’re moving you to another floor,” Scott tells him.

“That’s dumb,” Stiles mutters.

“It buys us time,” his dad tells him, and grips the handles of the wheelchair.

“Not a lifetime,” Stiles says.

His dad scrubs a hand over his scalp, and Stiles closes his eyes at the touch, rough and tender at the same time. “Don’t argue, kid.”

He pushes the chair out of the room.

 

***

 

Stiles ends up sitting in a utility closet on the third floor of the hospital. It smells like bleach and antiseptic. Scott leans on the wall beside him and his dad and Derek crowd in as well. Melissa is hanging around outside the open door. She’s jiggling a bunch of keys that looks like they came from the janitor.

“This is ridiculous,” Stiles says, hoping the words will kill his fear.

Derek crouches on the floor in front of him, and puts his hands on his knees. “Stiles, trust us, okay? Can you do that?”

Stiles only smiles slightly. He’s pretty sure Derek doesn’t want him to answer that honestly, because the only thing Stiles trusts right now, and has trusted for months, is that things can always get worse.

Derek reaches up and threads his fingers through Stiles’s. “All we need is some breathing room, okay? That’s all we need right now.”

This third floor corridor is quiet. In the distance. Stiles can hear a baby crying. They must be near the maternity ward. The noise triggers a wave of emotion in him, too confused and chaotic for Stiles to even tell if it’s positive or negative. He only knows it’s big. He stares into Derek’s wide, beautiful eyes and wonders if they can actually find their way through to the other side of this nightmare. He takes Derek’s hand and presses it against his abdomen.

A part of him expects Derek to pull away, or that he’ll at least see disgust flicker across his face. But Derek only holds his gaze, as steady as always, and splays his fingers. His touch is warm enough that Stiles can feel it though his hospital gown.

Derek doesn't look away.

It feels like a promise.

He knows that whatever happens, Derek will still love him.

Scott leans out of the closet. “Mom?”

“Nothing yet,” Melissa says, jangling the keys anxiously like she's ready to lock them in at any second.

Stiles looks up as his dad’s phone buzzes.

His dad takes the call. “Rafa. What the hell’s going on?”

So apparently his dad and Agent McCall are on first name terms now.

His dad listens intently, a serious frown at last giving way to something that looks suspiciously like relief.

From outside, the elevator dings. A moment later Stiles hears the heavy doors roll open.

Melissa fumbles with the keys.

“It’s okay. It’s Rafa,” his dad says, holding up his hand. Then he says, into his phone, “That was you, right?”

Stiles hears footsteps in the corridor, and Agent McCall’s voice as he gets closer. “…was me. Where the hell is everyone?”

He rounds the corner and Melissa waves him over.

Stiles’s dad steps outside to meet him. There are no more words exchanged. Agent McCall holds out a piece of paper to Stiles’s dad. He takes it, and reads it, and sags against the wall.

“Dad?” Stiles asks, anxiety clawing at him.

His dad holds the paper out to him.

For a moment, Stiles doesn’t even know what he’s looking at. He’d been expecting something official, with a government seal on it or something. Something that he can shove in Peter’s face and demand his freedom with. This is just a printout.

He frowns as he reads.

_What you were saying is absolutely correct. Nobody’s human rights should be dependant on a biological classification. Have you read that study in The Lancet? They estimated that up to 8% of betas are potentially misclassified alphas, or rather something between a beta and an alpha, because of unclear DNA markers. I don’t really get the science side of it, but apparently it’s something to do with an ongoing mutation, and some scientists think there should be a fourth classification. They also said it’s likely there would be the same misclassification rate in omegas. So we need a fifth classification? Where does it stop? Or maybe it’s time to stop using biological classifications to determine an individual’s legal status, and start treating everyone equally._

Stiles feels like he’s walked into the middle of a conversation. And, weirdly, that he should know exactly what conversation this is.

“Laura didn’t keep copies of any of these on her laptop,” Agent McCall says quietly. “She used a public computer at the library at Berkeley, and a fake name to set up the account. We had to track it back from the emails she sent MTB. It was a long shot, but it paid off. This one never got sent. It was still sitting in her drafts folder.”

Stiles blinks back tears.

It’s an email from Sprout.

_I’d love to meet up with you in person one day and discuss all this, but I understand that you might not want to risk that. Today there was a bunch of students in the quad painting placards for an omega rights rally, and I thought of how cool it would be if we could do that one day. Most people seem to think that omegas don’t even want to fight for the own rights because they never go to the protests, without ever thinking why. So that’s my thing. One day I want to be there when omegas feel safe enough to stand up and speak out. The problem at the moment is that the DOR controls public debate. That place is a house of cards though, just ready to come tumbling down. More on that later!_

_I wish I could tell you more, but ugh, I have to go and meet my uncle for dinner. That’ll be fun! /sarc. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow, MTB, and send you the link to The Lancet article. Love you, and stay strong._

_Sprout._

Stiles’s fingers tremble across the page. He blinks back tears as he looks at the header.

“February the twenty-third,” he says at last. “Der?”

“The night she was killed.”

Stiles’s breath shudders out of him. Laura wrote she had to meet her uncle for dinner, on the same night that she was killed. On the same night that Peter Hale told everyone he’d never left Beacon Hills. He shoves the paper at Derek so he can read it too. 

“He must have found out she knew about the embezzlement,” Agent McCall says.

“Is it enough?” Stiles asks him, trying to swallow down his hope.

Agent McCall nods. “Yes, it’s enough.”

Stiles sucks in a deep breath. “Then why are we still hiding in a fucking closet?”

 

***

 

Stiles insists on getting dressed. Peter Hale has seen enough of his body to last a lifetime. Except he hasn’t got any clothes at the hospital, so he pulls Scott’s hoodie on over his hospital gown, and then sits up in his bed with the blankets up to his waist. He makes sure his laptop is open, and on display. Because fuck Peter Hale. Stiles is getting his life back now.

“Let us handle this,” Agent McCall says about a hundred times to Scott and Derek. “He’ll have his lawyers with him. Don’t say anything they can use. Give this guy an inch and he’ll take a fucking mile.”

Scott and Derek both pace the room like caged animals.

Agent McCall makes a few phone calls. So does Stiles’s dad.

Stiles feels strangely calm.

When Peter Hale sweeps into the room, flanked by his lawyers, Stiles doesn’t even flinch. Maybe he should. He knows exactly what sort of monster this man is now and soon, so will the rest of the world. Maybe nobody will care that he beat the shit out of his omega, but they’ll care about Laura. Stiles will make sure of it.

“Omega,” Peter says, a smirk pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Glad to see you’re alive and well. How’s the baby?”

It’s not a baby, Stiles thinks. It’s a collection of cells with the potential to one day be a fully realized human being. Just like the human being Stiles was, before Peter came along and broke him down piece by piece.

“Omega,” Peter says, stepping toward Stiles’s bed. “I asked you a question.”

Stiles clamps his mouth shut.

His dad gets between Peter and the bed. “Take another step toward my son, and I won’t be responsible for what happens next.”

Peter’s smirk grows. “But of course you will be, Sheriff. Fully responsible.” He arches his brows. “And now I’d like everyone to leave my omega’s room. We have some catching up to do.”

“No,” Stiles says, jutting out his chin. “We really don’t.”

Peter’s eyes glint, and Stiles can almost see him savor the taste of the violence to come.

“You want this, John?” Agent McCall asks.

Stiles’s dad nods grimly. “Yeah, I fucking want this.” He steps forward, pulling his cuffs from his belt. “Peter Hale, I’m arresting you for the murder of Laura Hale. You have the right to remain silent.”

Peter’s shock is short-lived as Stiles’s dad runs through the rest of his rights. He huffs at his startled lawyers, and submits to the cuffs, and then throws a narrow glare at Stiles. “We’re not done, omega! We’re not finished!”

“You are,” Stiles says, his heart thumping wildly. “But I’m definitely not.”

“I _own_ you!”

“You never owned me. You don’t even fucking know me.”

When his dad and Agent McCall lead Peter away, Stiles starts laughing, and then crying, and when Derek comes and sits on his bed Stiles throws himself into his embrace and holds on like he’s never going to let go.

 

***

Stiles leaves the hospital through the back entrance, wearing one of Scott's caps pulled down low over his face. He doesn't want the media following him. Not today. 

His dad and Derek don't say much on the drive. 

Dr. Deaton’s office is closed. There’s no receptionist and no nurse anymore. The fish are gone. Deaton lost his license, Stiles’s dad told him, when Peter reported him for giving Stiles contraceptives. The magazines are still on the table though. Stiles stares at the one with the story of omega rights, and runs his fingers of the cover. Derek sinks into the chair next to him.

“Are you sure about this, kid?” his dad asks.

Stiles nods, and holds Derek’s hand. “Dad, I’m sixteen. I’ve thought about it. I’m not doing this for revenge on Peter or anything. I wouldn’t. And I’m not doing it to make a political point, or to just prove that I’m more than my biology.” He sighs and worries his bottom lip with his teeth. “But I’m sixteen, and I’m not ready to have a baby. Not now, and maybe not ever.”

Derek squeezes his hand in support.

If Stiles ever has a baby it will be ten years from now, at least, and it will be Derek’s.

“Stiles?” Melissa pokes her head into the waiting room. “We’re ready for you.”

Stiles’s stomach clenches from nerves. He’s about to get an abortion from an unlicensed doctor. Still, it’s a step up from a back alley, right? 

“You want me to come in with you?” Derek asks.

Stiles thinks about refusing, and then nods. Why not? He’s scared, okay?

His dad hugs him before he goes in, and Stiles breathes in the familiar scent of his dad’s body wash, and the laundry soap they use, and aftershave. His dad smells like home.

Melissa shows them through to Deaton’s office.

Deaton smiles when he sees him, sadly. “Stiles, I wanted to tell you how sorry I am. Your father and Derek came to see me, and we made a decision about the pills. I can only tell you how much I regret what happened because of what we did.”

Stiles swallows and nods. “I understand why you did it. I don’t hold it against you.”

This right here, he thinks, is Deaton’s apology. This procedure that can get him imprisoned if anyone finds out he performed an abortion on an omega without his mate’s consent. He volunteered to do the procedure though, which says more to Stiles than any words could.

Stiles undresses and settles down on the table. “You’ll knock me out for this, right?”

“Yes. You won’t feel a thing.”

“Just a pinch?” Stiles asks when he sees the syringe.

Deaton smiles again. “Just a pinch.”

Derek holds his hand.

Stiles could have got this taken care of in the hospital, like Melissa had said, and had someone alter his records to say it was because Peter beat him. But he didn’t want to do that. This is his decision, and he will own it. It might mean prison for him too if people find out, but he’ll own it.

His dad’s lawyer is looking into getting him returned into his dad’s custody, since, if Peter’s found guilty, he’ll be looking at life in prison. Stiles is happy with that, for now. But not forever. Because he suspects that the legal grounds for challenging custody are all about the fact that he won’t be able to fulfill his duties as an omega if his mate is in prison, and not because Peter was cruel and abusive and violent and a killer. He suspects it’s because the law thinks he should be freed to go and find another mate, and be a good little omega and breed. He’ll take it, for now, but he’ll fight it as soon as he can.

He closes his eyes when he feels the needle slide into the crease of his elbow—so _not_ a pinch—and breathes in and out slowly as the anesthetic takes hold.

He thinks there might always be a part of him that regrets this, just a little bit, but he also knows, without a doubt, that this is the right decision.  

  

***

 

Two weeks later Stiles is home from the hospital, once again sleeping in the bed he’s had since he was a kid. He’s also in limbo, living with his dad again, but still Peter’s omega. It could take months for the courts to reach a decision regarding his custody. He doesn’t see Derek as often as he’d like. Derek spends a lot of time in Berkeley, meeting with the prosecutors working on Peter’s murder trial. Peter did not get bail for that.

Scott visits every day after school, and Stiles helps him with his homework. It’s ridiculous. The omega, too dumb to be educated, is helping the alpha with his homework. They’re getting A’s as well.

Stiles wants to get a job or something. His dad is working a lot of overtime and double shifts to pay for the second mortgage he took to afford a lawyer, and Stiles hates it. He tries to apply for a few online gigs, designing websites and stuff, but the money’s basically shit. Then, one night when he’s online looking at ways to make cash on Craigslist, he finds himself checking out More Than Biology instead.

And then he finds himself posting.

_Hey guys. MTB here. I’m back. Probably not much I can say yet for legal reasons—don’t want to jeopardize my chances of getting returned to my dad’s custody—but I wanted to let everyone know that I’m alive, and I’m more or less in one piece, and that I’m not done yet._

Messages of support start flooding in.

There are a lot from omega rights groups, and Stiles saves them to reply to later. He never intended to become the face of the movement but, if he is, then he’s not going to waste it. Things need to change, and Stiles is going to make that sure that it happens.

Shortly afterward, requests from journalists start appearing.

Stiles only answers one of them: Braeden Smith.

_Hey, Braeden. Remember when you said to contact you if my circumstances change? I guess they’ve changed. I’m kind of in a legal bind at the moment because I don’t want to do or say anything that might fuck up the case against Peter, or fuck up my chances at getting him removed as my mate, but if the lawyers say it’s okay, I’d be willing to talk to you._

She replies within the hour: _And would be you willing to tell the truth this time? No judgment, Stiles. I’ve been there and done that._

He sends back: _You’re an omega?_ _How is that even possible?_

Her reply pings into his inbox. _I had a lot of friends who set me up with the ID and classification I needed. Unlike you, I didn’t have a high profile as an omega. But I think now might be the right time to come out. Do you want to catch up? I can be in Beacon Hills by the end of the week. Bring a lawyer if you want, but everything stays off the record for now, until it’s safe for you to talk openly._

Stiles chews his lip for a while before responding.  _Ok. That sounds great. I probably will bring that lawyer though._

Her reply makes him laugh: _Stiles, when I’m done with you, you won't just need a lawyer, you’ll need an agent and a publicist as well._

They email back and forth a few more times, setting up a meeting, and then Stiles hears the front doorbell chime. A few minutes later, footsteps creak up the stairs, and there’s a soft knock on his bedroom door.

Stiles opens it, and beams. “Derek! I thought you weren’t back until tomorrow.”

“I wanted to see you,” Derek says, a blush rising on his face.

“I can’t believe my dad let you in at this hour.”

Derek snorts. “Me neither.”

“How was it?” Stiles asks, taking him by the hand and pulling him over to the bed.

They lie there and stare at the ceiling, fingers twined together.

“Boring and horrifying at the same time.” Derek sighs. “How was your rehab?”

“Right hand, okay,” Stiles says. “Left hand still not so great. It has pins and needles now though, and I can type with it, so…” He shrugs.

“I was talking to one of the prosecutors today,” Derek says. “About you.”

“What about me?”

“His daughter is thirteen and just presented as an omega. He’s offering to work pro bono on your custody case. I passed his details onto your dad. A part of me hated talking to him, because you know he was the sort of guy who wouldn’t have ever spared a thought for omega rights until they affected him, but…”

“But we need all the help we can get right now,” Stiles finishes softly.

“Yeah.” Derek turns his head and smiles ruefully. “And I think I was angry at myself too, since I never really thought about omega rights until I met you.”

Stiles rolls over to face him and props himself up onto one elbow. “But, Der, that’s how life works. People don’t stop and think about stuff until it directly affects them. It’s human nature.”

“Laura thought about it.”

“Yeah. Maybe she was different,” Stiles says. “But I remember you telling me about your little brother, and how you thought he might present as an omega. Maybe Laura was thinking about him when she contacted me.”

“Matty,” Derek murmurs.

“Yeah, Matty.”

Derek’s forehead creases in a frown. “So you don’t care if people find their way to you for initially selfish reasons?”

Stiles shakes his head, wide-eyed. “Why would I? Do you think if I’d presented as a beta or an alpha, I would have started More Than Biology? I started it because I was a scared kid who’d just found out he was an omega. I started it because _I_ was selfish.”

“You’re not selfish.” Derek reaches up and cards his fingers through Stiles’s hair. “You’ve never been selfish.”

Well then, neither have you.” Stiles leans down and kisses him softly.

Derek pulls his head away.

“Der?” Stiles’s heart skips a beat.

“I don’t… I don’t _deserve_ this, Stiles.” His eyes fill with tears. “I don’t deserve you. After everything that happened, after everything he did while I just _stood_ there, I don’t deserve you!”

“No.” Stiles lays a hand against his cheek. “You don’t get to do this, Derek. You stood there because you couldn’t do anything else. If you’d tried, it would have made it worse. I wasn’t his mate, I was his collateral. His hostage, to keep you and my dad in line. That’s not your fault. That’s the system’s fault, and we’re gonna change the system.”

Derek offers him a wavering smile.

“And you don’t get to decide things for me, Derek.” Stiles runs his thumb along Derek’s lip. “You don’t get to decide what I deserve. _I_ get to decide that. And I love you, and I want you, and I’m going to get you.”

Derek blinks his tears away. “You always had me.”

“Good.” Stiles leans down and kisses him again. “That's good.”

They fall asleep together. 


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! Next time I'll write something a lot fluffier, I think :)

_Eight months later._

 

Stiles ignores the lights, and the people, and what feels like the twelve hundred cameras all moving and shifting on their tracks, and focuses on the familiar face sitting aross from him. Braeden. She gives him a killer smile.

“Stiles Stilinski, it’s so good to see you again. You’re looking well.”

Stiles resists the urge to point out she saw him at breakfast, and then again half an hour ago when he was panicking about not being able to do his tie up. “It’s good to see you too, Braeden.”

It’s been eight months, and the media interest hasn’t really shown any sign of abating. That’s good, of course. It’s just meant Stiles has had to get used to the weird kind of frenzied activity all around him, all the time. He can’t even go to the local diner in Beacon Hills for curly fries without someone approaching him. He’s like a movie star now, without the entourage, fashion sense, or obscenely high pay packet.

“This is your first time in New York, is that right?”

“Yeah.” Stiles remembers to smile. “It’s um, kind of overwhelming for a kid from Beacon Hills.”

It’s also his first televised interview, and he’s kind of shitting himself.

Why the hell did he agree to a _live_ interview?

“I’ve been trying to pin you down for months,” Braeden tells him.

His smile is a lot more genuine this time. “Well, I had to wait until I could fly. Omegas can’t, not without a mate or guardian’s permission.”

“And which was it, in your case?” Braeden asks.

She knows, of course. Every question has been carefully scripted.

Stiles looks at the nearest camera, and hopes it’s the one he’s supposed to be looking at. “Well, as of three days ago I don’t have a mate anymore, so my dad signed the paperwork letting me get on the plane.”

“You’re the first omega to challenge a mating bond in a court of law, and win. How does that feel?”

Stiles takes a breath. “Honestly? It feels great, of course, but it also feels like it’s only the first step on a really long journey. I’m seventeen now. If I was an alpha or a beta, in a year I’d be considered an adult. As an omega, that’s not the case. So that’s the next step, I guess. To turn eighteen and be allowed to make my own decisions without my dad having to sign off on everything.”

"And what is it that you want for yourself, Stiles?" 

"The normal stuff," Stiles says. He tries not to fidget. "I want to finish school. Proper school, not omega classes. And I want to keep my driver's license, and I want to go to college and get a degree, then get a job, and then have a normal life." 

Braeden curls her fingers around the coffee mug with the show’s logo on it. Why do they always have those coffee mugs? Stiles is pretty sure he doesn’t trust himself to pick his up. He’s so nervous he’d only drop it.

"Those are ambitious goals for an omega," Braeden says.

"Really?" Stiles actually laughs. "For anyone else they're incredibly mundane. It's nice to be special!" 

Braeden laughs too, before she grows serious again. “Last week the DOR in Illinois was successfully challenged in court by an omega rights group, to make the bidding process transparent. How do you feel about that?”

Stiles snorts. “I feel that if that had happened last year in California, I would have had a much happier sixteenth birthday.”

“You never would have become Peter Hale’s mate,” Braden clarifies.

“Not for anything,” Stiles tells her. “The ruling in Illinois is great, but it’s not enough to make the bidding process transparent. What needs to happen is for people to remember that omegas are people too. We don’t need separate education. We don’t need laws that prevent us from making our own choices. We just need our parents, and our friends, and our teachers and the people in the street to realize that we’re just the same as everyone else, and we deserve the same rights as everyone else. We have different biology, that’s all. We’re just as capable as anyone else as going to college, or getting a job, or running a company, or _anything_. We’re just people. For the first thirteen years of our lives, we’re people, and then suddenly we present as omegas and everything gets taken away from us. By the time we turn sixteen, we don’t have any rights left. It’s terrifying, and it’s not fair.”

The studio audience is quiet, and Stiles can’t tell if they support him or not. They’re listening though, so maybe that’s a good sign.

“Everything that Peter Hale did to me—and I know that there are people out there who support him—was legal. And that’s why the laws need to change. If he’d treated a dog the way he treated me, he would have been prosecuted for animal cruelty, and nobody would be defending him on talkback radio.” Stiles shrugs. “I like to think I deserve at least the same legal protection as a dog.”

“A lot of people will tell you that omegas are happiest serving a mate,” Braeden says. “Working in the home, and raising a family.”

“Some omegas are,” Stiles says. “Some betas are. Probably some alphas are. But, if they’re not, then why should they be forced into it?”

“Let’s talk some more about Peter Hale,” Braeden says. “When I first interviewed you, you seemed happy.”

“Because if I didn’t seem happy, he would have beaten the sh--the hell out of me.” Stiles flushes at his slip.

“And you ran away, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t get far,” Stiles says with a rueful smile. “That was the first time he really beat me. No, sorry, the first time he beat me was when I broke some glasses. But after I ran, that was the first time he beat me until I passed out.”

“And it got worse?”

“It got a lot worse,” Stiles says. “But I’m lucky. There are omegas who’ve been crippled or blinded so they can’t get away. There are omegas who are chained up twenty-four seven…” For a moment he’s back in the heat room, shackled, and he can hear Peter’s voice telling him that he’ll never leave the room. He shudders, and shakes it off.

“Stiles?” Braeden asks in a low voice.

“Sorry, I’m okay.” He clears his throat. “I got out with comparatively few scars except for these.” He pulls his sleeves up to show the scars on his wrists. “And I did those myself.”

He can’t help looking at the scars on Braeden’s neck. He doesn’t know the full story, and maybe he never will, but she told him she knew exactly what he’d been thinking when he slit his wrists, and her fingers had gone almost unconsciously to her throat.

“A suicide attempt seems very desperate,” she says.

“At the time, it was the only way out,” Stiles replies. “And in the same circumstances, I’d do it again.”

He’s suddenly very aware that his dad is in the audience, and how much it must hurt him to hear that. He’s told his dad before that he wasn’t mentally ill when he made the choice to kill himself. It was probably one of the most logical decisions of his life, and he stands by it. And he knows his dad doesn’t get it. Stiles is _glad_ he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t want his dad to ever be in a place where he understands. He doesn’t want his dad to ever feel as utterly void of hope.

“Only two percent of omegas who run away actually make it,” Stiles says, knowing that he’s looking at one of them. “I’d already tried and failed, and Peter Hale would never have given me that chance again.”

“Well, he’s the one locked up now,” Braeden says. “A thirty-three year sentence for murder, plus eight for embezzlement. I imagine that’s something of a relief for you.”

“I’m glad he’s locked up,” Stiles says, “but it’s not exactly a relief. I think the world would have been a better place with Laura Hale in it. I wish I’d got to meet her in person.”

“I think she would have been very proud to know that you’re sitting here with me today.” Braeden reaches out and puts her hand over his.

“I know she would be,” Stiles says.

 

***

 

They cut for a commercial break, and Stiles takes a sip of water. The audience murmurs to itself, and Stiles is relieved that he can’t hear any hostility coming from them. He’s a little more relaxed when they start again.

When they come back, Braeden shows him the cover of _Time_. There's a picture of his face on it, and wow, okay, Stiles has already seen it, but he still can't actually believe it. His dad has already ordered like a hundred copies. The headline says: _MTB. The omega who is going to bring down the DOR._  Stiles hopes they're right about that. 

He and Braeden talk about omega rights in general, and about More Than Biology. It’s not just a website now. It’s a Not For Profit with an office in San Francisco, so far concentrating on bringing all the disparate rights groups under the one umbrella, and developing a more focused approach. They’re lobbying not only congressmen and senators to change the laws, but also trying to get the support of big businesses and celebrities to help garner public support. It’s exciting, and frustrating, and necessary. It’s also the hardest Stiles has ever worked in his life. Stiles might be the public face of More Than Biology, but he’s also a teenage unmated omega still living in Beacon Hills. There’s not actually a lot Stiles can do to help in the day to day running of things, but he’s okay with leaving most of the official stuff the lawyers and the lobbyists who actually know what they're doing, and concentrating on the PR. It's still a hell of a learning curve. Also, he totally has a side project. A hideously illegal side project that nobody can ever know about.

Scott’s in charge of that. He’s proved more devious than Stiles ever could have imagined. It makes him proud, seriously, even when it keeps him up some nights with worry.

Because the website still hears the stories about the worst abuses of omegas, and Stiles can't do _nothing_. So every now and then Scott disappears in the middle of the night in Peter’s car— _thanks, Peter!_ —and comes back hours or days later looking sleep-deprived but satisfied, and telling Stiles that Aunt Gloria and the chickens say hi. Stiles isn’t exactly sure how many omegas Aunt Gloria currently has living on her farm, but he thinks it’s either six or seven.

It’s not a lot. It’s nowhere near enough, but sometimes it takes too long for the law to change. Those six or seven other kids would have been dead if Stiles hadn’t passed their details onto Scott.

Braeden does _not_ ask about that during the interview. She knows about it, since Stiles needed her help to set him up with people who could give them flawless fake IDs and classifications just like hers. She not only gave him the names of her contacts, but she regularly sends money to help out with expenses.

She doesn’t ask about the abortion either. Stiles knows that it will soon become a matter of public record, and he knows that he’ll cop a lot of hate for doing it. He knows it’s something he’ll be forced to address in public at some point, but he’s not ready yet, and Braeden is cool with that.

During the hearing for Stiles’s custody, Peter’s lawyers had demanded to know what had happened with the pregnancy. Stiles told them he’d had an abortion. He’d expected to be arrested on the spot, but the judge had ruled that if he found favorably for Sheriff Stilinski he was prepared to make the judgment _ex post facto_ , retroactive from the moment of Peter’s arrest for Laura’s murder.

Stiles still doesn’t know which deity to thank for that judge. His dad later found out the judge’s grandson was an omega and, by all accounts, as opinionated as Stiles.

Braeden ends the interview by getting up and giving Stiles a hug.

There is _applause_.

Stiles’s ears are still ringing with it when he leaves the studio and gets back to the hotel.

 

***

 

The flight back to Sacramento is uneventful. Stiles falls asleep on the drive back to Beacon Hills. He wakes up with an unattractive snort when they pull into the driveway. He staggers inside, his dad laughing at his exaggerated tiredness, and freshens up with a shower. Then he checks his emails, and More Than Biology, and then the mainstream news sites. The headlines are dominated by Peter Hale. He sees his own face a lot, and Laura’s too. He finds himself clicking on an opinion piece and checking out a few paragraphs:

_It’s not exactly justice of course. Nothing will bring back Laura Hale, or erase Stiles Stilinski’s personal trauma. But I have a feeling Alpha Hale will meet a special brand of justice when he finds himself in San Quentin, sharing the common areas with more than a few inmates who were jailed for attempting to liberate omega friends or family members._

Stiles closes his laptop. A part of him wishes he never had to hear Peter’s name again, but it will always be tied to his now, so it’s up to him to own the connection, and use it for something good. The mating bond itself, that biological pull toward the man who claimed him, has faded over time. Sometimes he still wakes up and reaches out for the body next to him, faint surprise catching him when it isn’t Peter. But more often than not he knows it’s Derek, and he smiles and drifts back off to sleep.

Stiles flushes as he unpacks his suitcase.

More often that not it’s Derek sleeping beside him, even though they haven’t done anything yet apart from kiss. And even though Stiles is supposed to be unmated now, he suspects his dad knows exactly how often Derek visits at night, and how often he falls asleep with Stiles, but apart from only once saying that Stiles is more than capable of deciding for himself who he wants to be with, his dad hasn’t mentioned it.

He and Derek are taking things slow.

It’s okay, really. Except for when Stiles wants more, but doesn’t know how to ask for it. Sometimes he wishes Derek would push a little bit, but of course he won’t. Even if he can tell Stiles wants to take things further, and, yeah, Stiles knows he can tell—the physical evidence is kind of hard ignore when it’s poking Derek in the stomach like that—he’s waiting for Stiles to tell him he’s ready. And maybe Stiles isn’t quite there yet, but that’s okay. Derek will wait.

The low hum of voices and the smell of food entice Stiles downstairs at last. He finds Derek and his dad in the kitchen, unwrapping burgers.

“Burgers, Derek, seriously? With my dad’s cholesterol?”

Derek looks adorably guilty. “Um, it’s a special occasion?”

“You watched the interview?”

“Of course.” Derek steps toward him and puts his arms around him, and kisses him softly. “You were amazing.” He smiles. “Of course.”

Stiles shakes him off and moves over to the table to snaffle some curly fries. “I was terrified.”

Derek rubs his back. “You were amazing.”

“I guess the news cycle is going to be full of me again for a while,” Stiles says. “At least until Braeden comes out as an omega.”

“She got a timeframe for that?” his dad asks around a mouthful of burger.

“In two weeks we’re putting up a challenge in New York against the DOR, arguing the laws are unconstitutional. So she’s thinking that will be a good time.” He looks up from the curly fries and sees the weird smile on his dad’s face. “What?”

“You,” his dad says. “I used to think it was pretty incredible how my kid attracted such brave people into his life, into his corner. I used to wonder how you did it. But I know now. You’re _you_. You inspire people, kid, without even realizing it.”

Stiles’s face heats up, and then he gets embarrassed for being embarrassed. He huffs, and makes a face, and possibly even flails a little. “Dad, c’mon!”

“No take backs,” his dad says, and shoves more burger in his mouth. Then he reaches for the container of curly fries and makes off with it before Stiles can even protest.

 

***

 

There’s a movie playing on TV that Stiles has pretty much dozed through. His dad’s already given up and gone to bed, so Stiles and Derek are sitting together on the couch. Snuggling together, actually. Stiles has attached himself to Derek’s side like a limpet, and he’s never letting go.

Derek isn’t complaining. He’s got an arm around Stiles’s shoulders, and he’s playing with his hair.

An ad for some new brilliant pharmaceutical comes on, and Stiles yawns, stretches, and snuggles closer.

“I love you,” Derek says.

Stiles pulls back slightly so he can look up at him. “I love you too.”

Derek smiles.

“So, was that leading somewhere, or was it just something you wanted to say?”

Derek leans forward and kisses him softly. “Just something I wanted to say.”

Stiles reaches up to tangle his fingers in Derek’s hair. “You know, I can probably stand hearing it for a while longer.”

“Hmm.” Derek’s breath is warm against his lips. “How much longer, exactly?”

Stiles tilts his chin so their noses bump. “How does a lifetime sound?”

“Perfect,” Derek tells him, and kisses him again.

**Author's Note:**

> So I was supposed to be working on these other two things that totally have deadlines. And also help pay the bills. And then this happened. 
> 
> #priorites  
> #thingsotherpeoplehave
> 
> It's my first attempt at A/B/O, but hey, you have to start somewhere, right? I'm also totally fascinated by the lack of agency and subsequent consent issues of an A/B/O universe. 
> 
> This won't be updated daily like I Know Where Babies Come From, Derek... because those were crazy times. But I hope to update about every week.  
> 8 chapters is a guestimate. Plotting is for others. Let's pants the hell out of this thing and see where it goes!
> 
> Also, I keep forgetting to tell people I'm now on tumblr:[thisdiscontentedwinter](http://thisdiscontentedwinter.tumblr.com)


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